"Forgotten but Remembered" By Corina Fitzgibbon

The title for my sketch book is “Forgotten but Remembered” which may appear confusing at first but I believe it explains the theme of my sketchbook perfectly. I have focused on an aspect of “childhood memories”; the absence of childhood objects and the memories we lose as we grow up and as the years go by. For example: not playing with our toys, abandoning them without realising.

There is a sense of beautiful nostalgia within the toys and objects from our childhood, a memory of childhood that fades as we grow up. A distant memory that had been beautiful, now there is sadness as the toys and objects are not being played with anymore and are left to deteriorate. There is a discomfort and eeriness about it. The toys have been abandoned by the children that once loved and played with them.

To portray this theme and concept throughout my sketchbook I used a variety of different techniques and materials including pencil and pen drawings, photo transfers, photography and collages. I had taken photographs of my childhood slides and swings at night to exaggerate the sadness the toys might feel (if they had emotions) when abandoned by the children and also because the darkness creates a sense of absence and loss of childhood innocence from an adults (myself) point of view, an adult reminiscing on their childhood and trying to reconnect to the past. I also used found imagery in my collages; the images were from Pripyat which is an abandoned city in northern Ukraine. It had been evacuated a few days after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, lots of children’s toys and dolls were left behind and were deteriorating as the years went by. These images seemed relevant to use as collages in my sketchbook as they portrayed the sadness and eeriness of the toys and childhood objects left behind.