Jana Pearceova - place and memory

Tracing my own journey, my work explores the notion of landscape and how memory informs our experience of place. Investigating connections, revealing differences and bringing  greater cultural understanding between the two places I call home. One is the place in Australia where I live now and the second, the place in Slovakia where I was born and grew up. 

My investigations take the form of  a series of encounters and dialogues with the specific landscape settings that link the two places, the lakes that surround both of my homes.

The lake-site becomes a place where present and past intersects and overlaps simultaneously.  Each place has layers of signification that trace, reveal and conceal its past and provide a sort of visual archive, evidence of life. The process of retaining memories  explores the play between the methods of gathering past fragments and personal experience of the present and how one interprets the varying states of transition between the two.

Walking through the current place is a real and direct exchange with another distant, past place. Contours and geographies seemingly create a space with no solid ground that provides transitory nature of the content for my material explorations. The resulting mixed media works are presented as an autobiographical archive, as a personal collection and a cultural activity that provides a reflective form of engaging with the past, confirming the sense of place and understanding of displacement.