Description

Wound and Memory begins with a familiar physical experience: the sudden sting of skin scratched by a thorny vine. For those who recognize the plant, its tangled stems and dense leaves can evoke not only a visual image but also the remembered sensation of touch. In this work, Jennifer Lee explores how memory can move between the senses, allowing something seen in the present to awaken a physical sensation from the past. Into this dense growth of vines and leaves, the artist introduces flowers that do not belong there. Scattered in pink and white among the greenery, they are a deliberate intervention rather than a botanical description. By inserting these imagined blossoms, Lee attempts to alter the viewer’s association with the plant, replacing a memory dominated by pain with a new visual image. The work therefore treats painting as an active participant in memory rather than simply a record of what has been seen. The original wound cannot be erased, but another image can be placed beside it. If the viewer encounters the thorny vine again, perhaps the remembered flowers will return with it. Pain and beauty can then occupy the same memory, subtly changing the way the past is recalled. Presented within Origins, Wound and Memory reveals an important thread in Jennifer Lee’s practice: the belief that perception, memory, and emotion are not fixed but can be transformed through images. The imagined flowers become new traces laid over an older sensory memory, anticipating her continuing exploration of what remains within us after a moment, an encounter, or even a wound has passed.