Tara-Bee Stephenson

The way memories change over time seems to continuously appear as a theme within my practice; the synchrony between private and personal recollections, inherited stories, and half remembered fairy-tales blur together into something mythic. Most of my work begins with fragments: childhood memories, symbols I’m drawn to, stories passed down… things that feel familiar and strange at the same time.

Through painting and woodwork, I return to motifs of ritual, theatre, and tradition, drawing from familiarities I grew up with cross-culturally. My concern with working with wood lies in its relationship to accumulation of memory and endurance, and its traditional engagement with craft and tactility.

With these works consolidated in a little playbill, ‘Memory to Mythology’, I aim to explore the tensions between instability of memory and narrative illusion, where recollection starts to behave like theatre.