Artist statement

Neha Kale

The phrase memoir stems from the French aide-memoire—a memory aid or document to help you remember. When I write from life, I’m fascinated by how remembering can be an imaginative act. Nonfiction is beholden to facts. Yet the writers I most admire—such as Joan Didion, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole and Deborah Levy—are concerned with our fallibility as narrators of our own experience. Memory shapeshifts. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves change according to our proximity to others and distance from the past. To me, the love line evokes the ways in which my life, here on Gadigal Land in the present is tethered by invisible strings that connect me to small moments and encounters involving people I love. As a settler in this country, my sense of self is more rooted in my relationships with others across place and time than it is in any contrived sense of belonging.

I believe we are shaped by our memories. But I also believe that our memories occupy a space somewhere between fact and fiction. To make Untitled (memory aid) I traced a map of the world, an attempt to define landscapes that I know and those I still dream about. Over a week at my parents’ house in Perth, the city in which I grew up but haven’t lived for two decades, I composed six short works of autofiction—pieces that can also be read as prose photographs—based on memories that I return to. Each one is addressed to a person I care about. Each is ordinary, unremarkable. An exchange. An observation. Or a minor sequence of events. By pinning them to locations where they unfolded, on the map I traced, I’m trying to plot the changing coordinates of my emotional geography and where I sit in relation to it right now.