The Weight of Memory: Un-scrollable Histories
Kelly Zou
This scroll-based artwork explores the emotional and historical weight carried by colonial-era objects and untold narratives across the world. Traditionally, scrolls are portable—designed to be unrolled, shared, scrolled, and carried. In this piece, however, the scroll resists full unfolding. It has become too heavy to scroll. Its growing material density and layered mark-making reflect how memory—shaped by migration, empire, and silence—can become too weighty to fully reveal or refold.
Built upon a composite landscape merging fragments of East and West—both real and imagined—this work brings together geographies such as Wuhan, Shenzhen, Edinburgh, Guyana, and the Pacific Ocean. It weaves visual responses to stories from the ANGUSalive World Cultures collection: Sujaria, an indentured labourer who gave birth during her voyage from India to British Guiana; the Polynesian women taken aboard the Bounty, whose craft and knowledge became tools of both survival and erasure; and the entangled opium and tea trades linking Britain, India, and China.
Objects become shadows. Figures fade. The scroll holds layered memories—some personal, some inherited, many incomplete.
As part of this project, I invited the public to contribute through a participatory artist talk and workshop titled What Can’t Be Unscrolled? Participants created their own memory fragments—drawings, writings, and reflections—assembled into a collective scroll. These contributions are integral to the work, amplifying the shared emotional landscapes that connect us across time and place.
This piece does not attempt to illustrate history, but to honour its fragmentation and depth. It invites the viewer to sit with what remains folded, concealed, or too fragile to revisit—and to imagine how we might hold these stories with care.
Work commissioned by ANGUSalive Museums & Galleries and on display at Forfar Meffan Museum & Art Gallery from 24 January to 20 April 2026.