"When a man has suffered much, and been buffeted about in the world, he takes pleasure in recalling the memory of sorrows that have long gone by." Homer, Odyssey, Canto XV

History is born at the exact moment in time when a human being develops self awareness.

The remembering and memorizing of one's actions and feelings and, in some cases, handing them down to future generations, constitutes the basis of the mechanism that produced the first oral traditions and the first forms of historic memory. Memory is a universal heritage of humanity, whether it be something closely connected to a personal ambit or something that involves society as a whole, and it is a fundamental element in the process of a human being's cultural and social development. Culture cannot exist without history: recollection and memory are nodal elements in the formation of the identity of a people, of a nation, but also in the formation of each individual human being.

It is important to note that, on the international panorama, reality inevitably dominates where the sense of history and tradition are strongest. Western contemporary society is, from a cultural and scientific point of view, inexorably connected to the ancient Mediterranean civilizations and one must not forget that concepts such as democracy, the centrality of man or, for example, in the scientific sphere, the concept of the atom and certain fundamental laws of physics, were all developed on the coasts of the Mediterranean sea more than two thousand years ago.

That same cultural and economic superiority of the United States, which has influenced the last fifty years of history in the western world, has managed to impose itself notwithstanding its relatively tender age, and has fully embraced, sometimes unknowingly, the historical and cultural inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon society of the late eighteenth century, a century during which there was a systematic revaluation of the cult of classicalism as the founding and decisive element of western culture.

Right now, when the East in enjoying its strongest influence yet on the West, it is significant that one of those countries in the forefront of this expansion, and namely China, has been able to occupy this position of predominance at a time when, renouncing or at least distancing itself from the most fundamentalist post-cultural revolution precepts, has tried to regain, as much as is still possible, its heritage of traditions and the nation's historical memory.

Memory and recollection are two of the basic elements in this young American artist's research. There is a certain significance in the fact that just such research should be carried out by an artist formed in the American ambit. In fact I am convinced that, on a general level, this sensation of a lack of strong historical traditions in a country such as the United States, born a mere two centuries ago, give or take a few years, has penetrated into the nation's cultural background. The concept of genius loci in Rory Burke's case appears fundamental to me, since her work, dedicated to memory, must be perceived as the answer to a need that can be clearly seen throughout American society.

In this sense Rory Burke claims the social role of an artist who becomes one of the main interpreters and a privileged observer of the idiosyncrasies and needs of the reality in which she lives or was formed.

In the light of what has been said it is interesting to note how, right from the early years connected to her studies and formation, our artist has matured the need to study in depth the knowledge of the roots and memory of that reality which surrounds her. In fact Rory Burke has alternated the traditionally academic study of sculpture and painting with a course in archaeology with particular attention being paid to the pre-Columbian culture and traditions of the native Americans. Such studies have led her to elaborate a language that has no equal on the international contemporary art scene.

© Rory Burke

Click on image to enlarge.

Rory Burke concentrates on the human skull which, in the artist's intentions, becomes the absolute symbol of man's prime essence, the privileged seat both of reason and emotion. Rory Burke's man is both spiritual and intellectual, where a great part of his brain activity is reserved for the 'filing' of recollections, meant not only in a archival or annalistic sense, but also as the best opportunity and indispensable requirement for the development of awareness. Rory Burke has created a string of small human busts for the exhibition in Lugano, all with a strong expressionist feeling, where the upper part of the head has been formed from transparent resin and then coloured. It is this portion of the skull, which in theory contains the recollections, the seat of one's memory, which becomes the sculpture's focal point. The skull takes on the value of a precious stone which, forced by the mundaneness of the flesh, frees itself from the stone to show its content, its treasure. The artist has included elements which, like insects or micro-organisms imprisoned in amber in these precious cerebral skullcaps, reveal something of the past or the history of each single subject.

Rory Burke's intention is to represent not so much each single individual human being, each with his own personal heritage of recollections, but rather the sense itself of the collective memory.

The titles of the works become fundamental viaticum to understanding the totality of this artistic achievement which is not consumed by that uniqueness which is inalienable to each individual sculpture, but continues on within the complex system of rows formed by the works which the artist has set out in lines, so that the visitor moves up and down them. The artist sees each single emotion as a fundamental mosaic in understanding the more general fresco dedicated to humanity in its prime, fundamental essence.

The anastrophic repetition of the human profiles, which is well suited to the iconic renunciation of portraiture realism in an attempt at a universal representation, merely confirms the sacredness of the whole and the message of communion that it creates along the lines of that same remembering. Like an archaeologist Rory Burke recovers an emotional dimension of a human being that is buried under the sands of technological man. Resin, ashes, natural and artificial elements meet here to give life to the long line of faces dedicated to memory, or to the series of small skulls, an implicit metaphor of the inescapable passing of time and of the levelling of differences between man and man, to settle into a reconciling and humanistic universality.

Through the unusual medium of her artistic talent Rory Burke takes us back into a primogenial dimension of man, where recollection and the transiency of time become a possible means of recomposing the disorderly puzzle of contemporary humanity.

Memoro ergo sum...