Memory is a physical construct in the brain, a series of connections. My practice is a metaphor for the nature of memory; organic forms coming together like neurons do when new memories form. I pull from scientific concepts of electrical and chemical signals in the brain to the Jungian metaphysical concept of the collective unconscious. Ultimately, I’m exploring how memory helps construct a continuity of self, the mind-body relationship, and how the process of memory can be flawed.

During the act of remembering something, the information accessed becomes fragile and must be reconsolidated into a new memory. This new reconfigured thing is slightly different from the original. My DNA is a sequence of coded modular information; my body remembers how to make itself. I am both directly responsible for this, and yet have absolutely no conscious control over it. This phenomenon is expressed in an element of harnessed chaos or restrained line kinetics in my work.

I’m compelled to continually revisit an image over time, to mine it’s meaning. My source material consists largely of photos I take on rejuvenating trips in nature. I isolate a photographic element and employ digital media to distill it into lines and shapes. The image is used as a modular unit of information, which I subject to a combination of photocopying, painting, printing, enlarging, projecting and collaging. It evolves across media and through repeated actions. The image acquires artifacts, looses definition or degrades. Information is added or deleted, evoking the unstable nature of memory.

I have always been fascinated by the appearance of similar shapes in disparate parts of nature; blood vessels, neurons and lungs are hidden images that reference the ubiquitous tree. My work emerges from an emotional response to nature, a meditation that connects my inner and outer worlds. In the best moments of my process I have the experience of extracting something from outside myself, as if it were pulled from the well of the collective unconscious.

- Michelle Orsi Gordon

rb1, paint marker on denril and Xerox, 2011