Michele Marcoux

Mnemosyne’s garden

Jackson's Art Prize 2025
Acrylic, Oil
Canvas
72 x 102 cm

£2,160

“My art practice explores our shared yearning for meaning and connection in an increasingly fragmented world. I work with paint, found imagery, stenciling, creating work that is dreamlike. I mine the material of my life—memories, photographs, found objects – looking for connections and disconnects, intersections of personal and collective memory. These fragments form threads that I follow. Film, literature, myth, histories of displacement, ghost stories, my experience growing up an identical twin, inform the process. Mnemosyne’s garden is inspired by the Greek goddess of memory who is also the mother of the nine Muses. Her name comes from the Greek word mneme, which means “remembrance” or “memory”. The Greeks considered memory important because it is necessary for artistic inspiration. This painting was also inspired by Winter Landscape with skaters (1608) by Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp. Its high vantage point and muted colour scheme gave me the feeling of seeing a memory in my mind. Mnemosyne’s garden is both a real and imaginary place, partly located in memory and partly in Dalry Cemetery a small Victorian graveyard where I used to play with my children. The painting is a contemplation of place, memory and the passage of time.”