The Weight of Memory: Fragmented Landscapes

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​Kelly Zou

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Memory is rarely whole. It is layered, interrupted, and continually reshaped through our encounters with people and places.

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This large-scale scroll combines drawing, painting, calligraphy, stitched fabric, and layered rice paper to bring together fragments of landscapes, emotions, and lived experience. Developed through my own journeys through memory and place, alongside conversations with five creatives working across different disciplines in Scotland, the work incorporates responses in forms natural to their practices, including drawing, intuitive mark-making, poetry, textile, musical composition, and film.

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These fragments are woven into the scroll, allowing different voices, memories, and ways of making to overlap, disappear, and re-emerge. Together, they form a shifting field of collective memory that resists a single, linear reading.

With contributions from Siwei Kang, Zoe Zhao, Samantha Ho, Max Chan and Niki Sukatorn.

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Commissioned by Creative Balance.

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Creative Balance is a forward-thinking research initiative exploring the mental health and wellbeing of racialised people in Scotland's creative industries. You can find out more on www.creativebalance.scot or @creativebalancescot on Instagram.