Anna Finlayson

A cognitive map; deconstructed, shifted, held up, and adjusted.

I remember where the dust settles on the windowsill explores our relationship to interior decoration and how interior surfaces affect our experiences and memories. Ceramics, photographs, MDF, and timber form a material language that (re)interprets our memories of interior surfaces in different ways. Drawing on a personal archive of photographs taken of my childhood homes in Tāmaki Makaurau, I have installed a version of these floor plans as a translation of the interior of my own mind.

Lingering in our surroundings, we so often overlook interior surfaces. Looking back on these photographs after several years creates a poignant reaction, a surge of nostalgia. How can we see interior design as frivolous when its presence produces such strong memories? These background characters which house us, suddenly seem to take on a lot more power.

To remember your grandparents' kitchen tiles, black and white, is to remember leaving to go home via the lolly jar and past the lamppost that stood on the grass patch in the courtyard.

If I remember the windowsill above my desk, I can remember the rock garden just outside it, where three years earlier I had planted marigolds from seeds in my grandmother's flower pot.