Memory Has No Grammar

2014 Photo of photo of Lucy taken by Anne Bean in 2004 and then attached to the outside of her studio windows to allow the weather to wear it away.

Moving image / HD video / 2015 
7 minutes 8 seconds 
Commissioned by Anne Bean as part of Decade at Dilston Grove, London
Funded by Arts Council England
Also exhibited as part of The London Group Open Exhibition / 2015

In October 2004 Anne Bean invited five artists – Lucy Cash, Holly Darton, Meg Mosley, Miyako Narita, and Lucille Power to witness a once-only performance in a Scout Hut on the edge of Southwark Park, London, UK. No form of notation or recording was allowed in order to ensure that the original event existed only as an ‘electro-chemical trace’ within the mind of each artist. Exactly a year later this shared memory was publicly revealed in all of its mutations - each artist attempting to recall what she had seen.

Unable to attend the scheduled re-enactment, Lucy wrote down everything that she could remember a few days before the event and then edited it into a script which she sent to a surrogate performer. As her friend Katie Hims performed this script in London at 7.30pm, Lucy performed it to an empty room in Chicago at 2.30pm. In order to help connect her back to the scout hut, her performance took place in a church hall to a gathering of empty chairs arranged in a circle, just as they were a year before during the original performance.

Extract from review in RealTime Arts by Judith Palmer:

“As version followed version, the pattern became clear. The performance’s metaphor, and the actions and symbols that carried it had survived. The words that were spoken had evaded recapture. A quirk diverted the pattern: Lucy Cash, from the original quintet, was unavoidably abroad, and chose to write instead about her memories and send her friend to read them. Cash was no nearer to reproducing the incantatory text Bean might have voiced, yet the delivery of her rich and poetic meditation redressed the balance of wordlessness in the evening overall. Together, the succession of reinterpretations formed a composite truth. The intensive inquiries of the intervening year had subtly redirected the focus of Anne Bean’s own thinking. A year on, even Bean was unable to sift for certain what might have been from what has been; the things she thought about saying from the things she decided not to say. Bean was not the gatekeeper to the memory. We all had a key.”

Ten years’ later Anne Bean invited the same group of artists to attempt new works, with the original shared memory as a trace.

Memory Has No Grammar follows the passage of the sun as it moves in and around a building highlighting everyday objects: a ruler, a notebook; red geranium petals, a glass panel above a doorway and a photograph of a figure at night with the moon. The objects form an incomplete list that might provide clues to the task of remembering an act that took place in near darkness and in which the body of Anne Bean became mixed up with thread and flowers and words.