This three-channel video installation explores the shifting relationship between memory, vision and spatial perception, and the ways in which images and our surroundings evoke an awareness of the present and an engagement with the past.
Drawing upon Sancho Taylor's extensive photographic and moving-image archive, the work unfolds through a series of fragmented visual encounters. Stairwells, passageways, interior spaces and glimpses of the outside world become sites of transition, where familiar imagery is disrupted, reframed and reinterpreted.
Revisited during a period of recovery from a head injury that profoundly altered Sancho Taylor's experience of vision and spatial perception, the original footage began to reveal new associations. An accidental inversion of archival imagery introduced a second visual perspective, its mirrored sequences echoing the disjunction between seeing and perceiving, and the ongoing attempt to bring fragmented visual information into alignment.
Through repetition, layering, sifting and levitating, the work evokes the rhythmic and transitory nature of memory and perception. Images oscillate between clarity and ambiguity, foreground and distance, inviting the viewer to consider the instability of seeing and remembering.
Central to Sancho Taylor's practice is an understanding of the archive as an evolving space rather than a fixed record of the past. While photographs and moving images preserve moments in time, their meanings remain in a continual state of flux, shaped by the circumstances in which they are encountered.
In returning to imagery made years earlier, the work becomes an act of renewal, where past experiences are reimagined through the present.
Image credit: Melanie Jayne Sancho Taylor, Reflecting Back Through The Window, 2012 (2024). Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 50.91x70cm, Edition of 5 + 2 Ap.
