Jill McCarthy

My sketchbook is a personal collection of drawings, photographs and bits and pieces that make up daily life. Treasured fragments are concealed in its pages – a tiny silver paper decoration from my grandmother’s wedding cake and shopping lists she wrote as a very old lady. It is the detail of personal experience, past events and response to place that I like to incorporate into my work as a kind of record or memorial.

	The idea of the trace of human activity; remains, fragments and the preservation of memories built up in strata-like geological layers is the key idea I have explored through collage, ceramics and papier – mache. Geological processes have always fascinated me and I like the analogy of memories released over time like fossils slowly revealed through erosion.

A collection of family letters and photographs have been carefully selected from, the piecing together of memories contained in the pages recall stories from the past. My sketchbook pages have ‘grown’ outwards in an organic manner as the key themes of family, landscape, fragments and figure evolve.