This work explored the nature of memory, both individual and collective and the fallibility of both. By using pages torn from books then folded into boxes, disordered and rendered unreadable, I sought to express how memory is a paradox of order and chaos.

It was the incidental unfolding of a box and the discovery of the inerasable mark of the fold in the paper when I realised much of my work to date had links to memory, both individual and collective, and the fold offered great potential to continue exploring this.

Jacques Derrida says in Paper Machine, “Paper is the support not only for marks but for a complex ‘operation’ – spatial, and temporal, visible; tangible, and often sonorous; active but also passive (something other than an ‘operation’, then, the becoming-opus or the archive of operative work).”¹ It was this ‘archive of the operative’ I became interested in.

Through Derrida and then Giles Deleuze, I discovered the concept of the fold in ontological philosophy and the tension between being/becoming. Angelika Seppi’s paper, Simply complicated: thinking in folds helped me begin to decipher Deleuze. “What is folded now operates neither as a plus nor as a minus, neither in addition to nor as a subtraction from what has already been folded then. It is both a plus and a minus, both an addition and a subtraction.”²

Seppi also notes of the fold, “It also reveals other aspects, invisible up until folded, its bottom surface, for example, or flexibility, while repressing others, its former top surface, for example, or its full extension.”³