'The Valley of Lost Things' by Claire Davies at Two Queens, Leicester

"The Brain is part of the material world, the material world is not part of the Brain,"

— Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. 

 ‘The Valley of Lost Things’ tells the story of the losing and finding of a key. Through these events, three key versions existed; the original, the imagined, and the found key. It’s unclear how these three keys came into being and expired. It’s possible that they crossed paths and influenced each other's existence. Through the losing, imagining and finding, something external became internalised, was reformed into something else, then regurgitated. 

 Claire Davies tells this story through a set of new video works and sculptures that allow a consideration of memory as a cerebral substance, a weird protoplasm made of the internalised vision of an object and its physical existence. Davies uses 3D rendering and scanning to try to get closer to reality experienced internally, in which objects can be seen from many sides at once, can be made to exist within a range of contexts and environments and take forms bearing no material relation to its original, but which might be more real than its physical self. 

This exhibition is part of a programme of exhibitions and events at Two Queens across 2016-18 kindly supported by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Leicester City Council and De Montfort University.