“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments, I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when film on the camera reaches only the eye."1In an e-mail conversation with Maysey Craddock to discuss her work for this exhibition she sent me an image of an embroidered line of text she was working on. It said:
 “ It is always exactly the way I remembered it would be”
 But when she e-mailed the title, it became:
 “ It is exactly the way I always remembered it to be.”

In the translation from a poetic line lingering in the mind, to hand embroidery and then to written text in an e-mail, the words shifted from would be to to be. What happened in this translation?  Is there a difference? Does it make a difference? In describing the process of how one became the other, Craddock said  “ … I had, somehow, to sew it down” and when she did this, the words became: “exactly the way I remembered it would be.”

I asked her about this unconscious slip in translation from embroidered to written statement and if there is a difference in meaning for her.  Craddock replied,
“It is about the idea of forming a present through memory, of mapping out an idea of events, ideas or emotions that happen to us in our lives.  Remembering it ‘to be’ implies a direction to me, a sort of vector of a kind of fatalism. Of course we can’t predict the future but it is only human that we try to imagine it, that we have an idea of it that we try, somehow, to follow.  Then, remembering it ‘would be’ leaves a little room for choice or interpretation, our interpretation of our life events and our subjective experience. The sewing gave me time to chew the words and it changed as I sewed it, maybe it went through many incarnations before it became a sentence.  I would forget what I wanted to say, so it became a very circular idea. In sewing it, it became ‘would’ instead of ‘to’ because when I got to the end of making it I was so much further in the future than the original idea, so I was basically working off of a memory of what I was intending to say.“ The process of translating one thing into another as artistic practice lies at the core of Maysey Cradock’s work. Her gouache drawings on paper bags are not indexical, like the original photographs that form the starting place of the work. There is no automatic one to one relationship between the image depicted and the depiction in the original. This tension between the image and the process of translating photograph to line drawings is one of the key elements that generate the ghostly space of this work.  The tracing, drawing and reworking of the “original image” is part of a time consuming process that Craddock invented as a way to find her own interpretation of the image as a repository of memory. She writes:“It is all about past and future, and the present being an ever-changing in-between place that bridges us from one to the other. “Exactly” is the present, “remember it” is the past and “to be” or “would be” is what we make of it, how we change it into what our future idea of it will be.

The way I am drawing the images on the bags, the fact that they are drawn several times, gives me a way to distance myself from the reality of the image, its existence in real time, so the changes that happen in the drawing and re-drawing put the image squarely in a place of my experience/memory of it. In drawing and re-drawing it, the boat for example, I am able to present an interpretation of how I remembered it to be, and then it becomes a visual memory of what I remembered it would be. The blackness, the chemical green background and the gaping dangerous collapse of it make very real the sense of destruction that I felt when I saw the boat on the beach after hurricane Katrina. So, letting myself find a way, in the present, to remember how I knew I would remember it makes it mine and makes it real for me. A memory of a tree is not ever just the tree, but also what happened beneath it, the way it smelled, the knowledge that maybe something is buried beneath it.“The use of photography as the source for Craddock is a departure from her earlier work.  Historically, the invention of photography challenged paintings’ capacity to represent reality. Questions of representation have not disappeared nor has painting. For Charles Sheeler, active in the 1930’s, working as both a photographer and painter during a time of dramatic social and political change in the United States “Photography is nature seen with the eye outward, painting from the eyes inward” His photographs of the built commercial ”utopia” revolved around consumerism and the decontextualization of American history. Factories and the industrial landscape became his version of an historical myth and “pleasurable aesthetic”2

In Gerhardt Richter’s, series, October 18,1977 (1988) painted in a gray blurred monotone from the newspaper photographs and private snapshots of the dead urban guerrillas of the Red Army, Richter remarked, ” The photograph provokes horror, and the painting-with the same motif-something more like grief.”3  The grisaille, the blurring of the image, creates just enough distance for the viewer to stay with the explicit images of dead bodies in a way the photograph of the same image might not be possible. The painted version seems to balance the direct address to public events with an indirect quality.4In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans, Craddock’s former home, she visited the devastated city and photographed relics of the disaster. What we see or imagine as the truth might be its opposite. Craddock’s process of making images and installations suggests that what is visible might not be the whole truth, but another truth of what is possible.