CINDY BAKER

Things I’ve forgotten incorporates audio, object-making, sculptural installation, and performance to explore the relationship between trauma, memory and the body.

The basis of the audio piece is a set of digital recordings of 20 voice actors reading a list of the five hundred dreams I’d written in my dream journal to that date (dreams which I forget soon after writing them down). The fact that I forget most of my dreams soon after I write them down (just as most of us forget our dreams shortly after waking) means that revisiting my dreams is a parallel experience to remembering a long-forgotten memory. 

The accompanying sculptural rubber ducky sofa dream-object acts as a visual corollary to the absurdity of this bizarre stream of dreams; an oversized toy in an oversized kiddie pool. Presenting a potentially threatening, confusing, or unintelliglble situation in a way which harnesses cuteness, cartoonishness, or childishness usually disarms aggression long enough to allow for a vulnerability that is affective of both the artist and the audience (or the subject and the witness). This is an ongoing goal through my work – to affect the audience in ways that may be quiet and subtle yet significant, and to be affected in ways that change me and help to evolve my work. 

Through this project, I am attempting to set in motion a process by which I can trigger the emergence of memories long-buried by past trauma. This experiment in personal betterment and catharsis through the creative process has a long art historical tradition. In my own practice, this type of experiment walks a tightrope between earnestness and cynicism; setting up (usually hilariously futile) challenges to my personal limitations, and attempts to make myself into something that I am not serve to highlight the futility of the search for perfection and the altogether human desire for knowledge.