Many truths can exist at the same time

The Peisley Memoir books create a flow state that is never static. Their contents move backwards and forwards through time, experience and memory. The words that appear within them are almost always my own — poignant fragments and private memes, scribbled down at particular moments and carried forward.

The project is a form of saying difficult truths. It recovers territory lost through dissociation and returns to experiences that were too painful, confusing or emotionally charged to hold directly. Enormous feelings can exist safely within the books because they are tucked amongst layers of images, objects, colour and association. Nothing has to be pinned down completely. Something acute can be disclosed without being explained away.

Familiar objects recur: things with a particular symbolic resonance, but also things that have actually occupied a place in my life. They become markers within a shifting internal landscape. The books allow different versions of an experience to coexist — memory, fantasy, grief, humour, anger, tenderness and hindsight — because many truths can exist at the same time.