03/09/2026
Alongside her current exhibition, Charlotte Dawson has gathered books that offer points of entry into the ideas, materials, and atmospheres that shape If Memory Serves Me Well. These books trace connections between memory, loss, repair, ritual, and the ways places come to hold emotional significance.
If you would like to explore these books in more detail, pop in to our Café bar and find them in our Reference Library area.
Memory, Documents of Contemporary Art / Whitechapel Gallery
‘’Memory has been an important resource for thinking about the relationship between objects and remembrance within my practice. In particular, Paul Ricoeur's distinction between pure memory and memory impressions resonates with my use of casting, where objects become impressions rather than replicas. Throughout the exhibition, memories are similarly shifted and remade, nothing appears as a 'true' remembrance, but as something fragmented, altered and materially transformed.''
Automotive Glassfibre, A practical guide to Moulding and Repair / Denis Foy
''Although an instructional manual, Automotive Glassfibre became a bible for how I would construct sculptures exploring memorials to roadside collisions through the materials of automotive repair. The book revealed a tension between repair and irreparable absence, while the publication’s cover shaped my interpretation of fibreglass as a material - arriving at a vibrant, almost ectoplasmic green that carried into the visual language of the fibreglass sculptures.''
The Child Who / Jeanne Benameur
''Like the exhibition, The Child Who explores the absence of a person, experienced through spaces, objects and everyday rituals. Both examine how absence can become a tangible presence, and how people learn to live alongside loss through memory, nature and small acts of care.''
A shining / Jon Fosse
''Both A Shining and my exhibition are concerned with the intangible, the feeling of being beside something you cannot fully enter or explain. Through landscapes, light and moments of quiet revelation, they explore grief as a mysterious and deeply human experience. A shining and The Child Who, both predominantly take place within a forest. This connection to tree cover as environments that hold certain atmospheres of stillness, contemplation and reverence follows through into my exhibition. Where the shadows and fruits of trees intersect the physical experience of existing within the space.''
If Memory Serves Me Well is open until Sunday 20 September. Find out more: https://humberstreetgallery.co.uk/events/if-memory-serves-me-well-charlotte-dawson/
