Don’t Forget To Remind Me To Forget

“Don’t Forget To Remind Me To Forget” is a show of an ongoing series of paintings that started in 2019.
The work is comprised of words and phrases that stem from apologies to myself or self-counseling precepts since my very late diagnose of ADHD in late 2018.

My initial inspiration to use words as images started before my ADHD diagnosis. Noticing the CAPTCHA test to prove that I wasn’t a robot using my computer, I always found the shapes of those computer generated free-style texts amusing. They seemed to be the way babies would write before they could make straight lines or line up the alphabet letters in consistent sizes to accidentally form words. And the poem Alphabets by Seamus Heaney reminded me of how learning alphabets of any languages starts with pictures/images first: “ A fork stick that they call a Y, A swan’s neck and swan’s back makes a 2”, and so on.

The all consuming new knowledge filled with confusion, relief, mournful regrets couldn’t help but be incorporated into my new work. Hence the project started (both psychologically and with my art) by writing down habitual phrases I used to tell myself, ostensibly to be rid of all the self-reproach that was on automatic pilot most of my life. These phrases guided the palette, compositions and mood for the paintings. Then the words, letters were repeated, stretched, overlapped and reshaped, to where they merely functioned as design elements for the image. The words lost some of their emotional charge as they became abstract during the repetition and reframing; perhaps I discovered a self-help tool (as Bueys had suggested) although temporarily.