Delayed Translation
Rosny Schoolhouse Gallery

Neuroscientist David Eagleman (b.1979) theorises that one is always living in the past. There is an unbridgeable gap of half a second between an event occurring, and your conscious experience of it. Our present is then a delayed experience, an immediate past. Our perceived present is thus specious, offering only a slither of the information surrounding us up to our attention. 

Through Delayed Translation Bella Dower lingers over the space within the half a second of the act of remembrance. The layers in which our world is perceived and remembered are stretched thin; the fragile membrane of our present is a complex, shifting reality. Dower’s practice is a hybrid of image making and sculpture. In her inaugural solo exhibition the artist explores the notion of the present moment as being immediately past, and the assumption of ‘flawed’ recollection.

The artist’s practice is backgrounded by the harrowing experience of a shed fire on her parent’s property in 2018. Over 40 years of familial objects, heirlooms and rolls of analogue photographic films were impacted by the fire. The unrepeatable material destruction orchestrated chance compositions and are digitally printed on large silk sheets. Hanging in the gallery, the fabric is punctured by small silver objects - cast debris salvaged from the rubble of the fire. The process of translating the original into abstracted forms combine to shape a new narrative and archive, oscillating between the familiar and ambiguous.