My creative task is a combination of still images and text that I have used to represent the mood of nostalgia that I feel for the loss and memory of my Grandad who died when I was 5 years old.
I have this very vivid, specific memory of picking strawberries with him in my grandparents’ garden at their home in Wanaka. I can relive this memory only through the way I first experienced it which is, unfortunately, through the excitable eyes of a young child. It’s the thrill of picking berries and their bold colour and taste that I remember, not him. I have emphasised my focus on the berries – from their colour to their tastes – in these images. I was so excited when he pulled back the leaves and they were tucked away, as if they were hiding but waiting to be found. I remember how much I loved the taste. I remember the red which seemed so bright, but I don’t specifically remember his face, no matter how hard I try I can’t recall it to my mind. It’s so frustrating. If only I had been focused on him and not the berries I know I would remember him better.
I cut his head out of the drawings I did and images I used to show this. I cannot remember him rather just doing things with him. As an adult now, it makes me sad that I found more pleasure in berries than in Grandad himself, I wish I had known him better and asked him more questions. I used the text over the images to voice this present frustration of mine as well as my childish enthusiasm over the berries, both of which I experience now while recalling this scene. When I look back and realise my lack of memory of him, I wish I was able to be back there with him, not having to relive scenes through my frustrating memory but just live them firsthand, although I know it’s impossible and it is beyond the point when I will ever pick strawberries with him again.
The two components (images and text) demonstrate the theory of nostalgia, specifically Grainge’s notion of nostalgia as a ‘mood’. He describes nostalgia as a yearning for a past which is exactly how I feel. As he states, the nostalgia mood emerges from, and relates to, a fundamental concept of longing or loss (Grainge, 28).
I wish so much that I could go back to that, when I had what seemed like endless time with him. I have tried to show this in the second part of the creative task in which I have shown several photos of the two of us, not one specific memory rather snippets of memory I have, of the things we were doing, but not him.
This is further shown by my lack of focus on him in the photos – in each I am looking somewhere else, caught up in my own thoughts and feelings about what we were doing and it is these I remember. The emotions, being happy, laughing and loving doing things with him – but no matter what, I cannot recall his face. The fuzzy edges of the photos and the old, grainy, home video-like blurriness of the images represents my lack of memory – as if these sequences are fragments of a past life, a lost time that I can never return to. The images turnings away like the pages of a book signifies the only way I can ever experience Grandad now, through my blurry memory, like flicking through the pages of an old book.
The few clear images I do have that he is a part of place him on the outside, never fully visible but rather pushed aside in my mind to make way for the thing I find more exciting. The task also demonstrates the tendency of nostalgia to present an often non-linear perspective of history but rather a series of unordered memories. This is demonstrated in the second part of the creative task in particular.
TEXTS CITED
- Grainge, Paul. ‘Nostalgia and Style in Retro America: Moods, Modes, and Media Recycling’. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 23.1 (2000): 27-34.
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