Pillow Book

When I returned to the past, I found that memory had not kept it still. The heartache was real, but the facts had shifted over time. Some details had faded, others had grown brighter, and what remained was no longer only what had happened. It had become something else — a place shaped by longing, imagination and the slow changes of memory.

Vandebrug often returned from his travels feeling that his photographs had missed something of what he felt when he took them. He began dividing the images into hundreds of fragments and recomposing them into landscapes that describe a past feeling rather than a single place.

In Pillow Book, individual transfers on handmade paper cards sit beside one another like pieces of a memory. Some details stay close to their source; others change as the work is assembled. The result moves between a view we can recognise and one shaped by recollection and imagination.