Lily Meng
Thoughts to Memories, Memories to Dreams
Prompt: The final project must capture the "essence of time" and explore its abstract qualities, with emphasis on themes such as change and continuity, ephemeral, past/present/future, etc.
I focused on the themes of past/present/future with an exploration of memories and their unreliability. Through papercutting and colored spreads, I explored the vivid memories of my childhood self and how they were impacted by the books I had read, which were responsible for those vivid memories. Initially looking back, the papercutting represents the memories I hold at a glimpse–only able to recall snippets and unable to see the entire picture–but if I reread or rediscover moments of my childhood, which have been happening as I’m stuck at home during quarantine, I find myself immersed once again in those memories. They border on fantasy and dreams, as those three elements all mix together to form a vision that cannot be real but is what I can recall. Flipping it over, the back reveals a monotone panel, in which these memories fade with time, but at the end, there always remains an opportunity for rediscovery with my books, which, in contrast to myself, have not changed with time.