misfolds

Artist, William Kentridge once said, “There is a narrow band of memory in which we can survive. If we forget everything, as in a kind of dementia or Alzheimer’s, it’s very difficult to function in the world. But if we remember everything we’re also paralysed by trauma, by memory.”

In misfolds, Dawes examined misfolded proteins and their links to different degenerative diseases. Study has shown the incorrect folding of proteins in large numbers is the root cause of dementia, and directly linked to memory loss. Continuing on from the failure of memory series, Dawes examined the design of the origami box, fold by fold.

Dawes made a series of woodblock prints in pthalo blue, delineating each fold by a single line, then deliberately folded the prints the wrong way. The works were then hung in their unfolded state, in a deliberate cluster of disorder.

Using the trope of the fold as a metaphor for memory in the failure series was based on philosopher Gilles Delueze’s The Fold, in which he writes, “For the fold affects not only all kinds of materials, which thus become matter of expression in accordance with different scales and speeds and vectors (the mountains and the waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain)…”