Engrams Rome 2011

This series of works was developed during Finch’s Abbey Fellowship in Painting at the British School at Rome (BSR) (January-March 2011). The Fellowship was conducted as a research project involving the creation of an image archive in Rome, through photography and the collection of found images, which then constituted the material for a series of new works. The conceptual framework employed Walter Benjamin’s ‘Passagenwerk’ project and Aby Warburg’s ‘Mnémosyne Atlas’ as key references and as the means to structure images in relation to questions of time, space and place.

The 11 works created during the Fellowship, entitled ‘Engram’, are layered photo-reliefs which explore the specificity and context of the images and their material relationships, as layers, within a picture form. These works became important in developing how the research question and process might materialised objects that are best thought of as tableau structures as they are neither strictly paintings, sculptural reliefs nor photographs but are, more concretely, pictorial forms. The pursuit of the research propositions and this particular period of studio practice led to the wider development of the theoretical framework of the tableau form that evolved into the ‘Tableau Project’ and to the on-going development of a studio process. Work has continued on the series and to date it totals 43 works.

Works from the Fellowship were first exhibited in ‘The Producers’ at BSR; a group show of artists who were resident at the BSR in 2011. Nine works from the ‘Engram’ series were exhibited with a catalogue that mapped individual images and their combination into ‘Engram’ reliefs. The other artists in the exhibition were Alison Crawshaw, Richard Gasper, Janet Haslett, Barbie Kjar, Annee Miron and Elizabeth Price. Three works from the series were subsequently shown at Ex Roma at A.P.T. Gallery, London (2012).