Allen-Golder Carpenter: Water Memory

The transcript of Carpenter’s interview with his grandfather also got printed on the reverse of another freestanding, sculptural installation, preserved in inmate inventory bags handed to people before getting incarcerated, each filled with a shredded piece of tanktop mingled with shattered glass. These elements raise questions of identity while one is coming to pieces, falling apart as a person. What do you pick back up and take with you? What do you leave behind - against our will? And are there pieces shattered in you you never get back or can’t put back together?

This theme of something shattered, holding something together against its will, is also embodied by the central installation Body Surrogate 1. The core element of this piece is the artist’s shower cabin from his childhood home, in a shattered state, spreading minuscule fragments of tempered glass across the floor while larger shards are forcefully held together with translucent tape. Once again, it connects with the idea of water as a holder of memory in an almost literal sense, with the artist including a glass of water behind the damaged shower cabin. Interested in the subconscious and dream theory, Carpenter here references a superstition predominantly established in Africa that putting a glass of water under your bed wards off nightmares and thus expands on the symbolism of water used in their work. Water holds memory; it remembers - but what memories do tears hold?