Lesley MacGregor

Memories Recorded in Water | These two series, Pattern Separation and Tales of the Sea, explore how we move through our lives, finding patterns where none seem to exist, sculpting from them a narrative of our experiences. The ocean is the perfect medium for these thoughts, ceaselessly changing yet comfortingly the same.

Pattern Separation is a meditation on being in lockdown: as the days slid by, one becoming another with nothing to mark the progression from week to week, time ran together. Psychologists call this inability to differentiate memories pattern separation. The series juxtaposes identical backgrounds of water, with the working boats whose differences become clear only as you observe them more carefully. Together they are a reminder of when time stood still and I clung to the small differences — a red hull or blue, a barge or a freighter — to mark the passage of time in an unending sea of repetition.

In Tales of the Sea, old sail boat hulls, resting in dry dock bear the story of every voyage they’ve taken, etched by currents, waves, and debris. The pattern of accumulated memories, written in chipped paint and rust stains, bookends the ocean itself, author and scribe of their adventures. The initial impression of shape, colour, and space provides an emotional tapestry for the series before these abstractions resolve themselves into specific representations.

Both series express my interest in how our memories reshape our past, how we narrate our lives based on experiences rather than on objective facts, how each of us builds our own fragile reality. My photographs take this internally constructed world and make it external with photographs that feel like thoughts, slightly untethered from the real world, showing my unique way of seeing. www.lesleymacgregor.com