The name comes from the title of a book by Arthur C. Clarke, but also a piece of text from a poem by Alfred Edward Housman, which speaks about the passage of time where the poet asks if anything we create can be immune and saved from the passage of time or oblivion?...
I examine what memory of individuals, families, missing persons actually is ... After a person disappears, can the image of that person be sustained through something they left behind, or is it constantly changing as time passes, what happens? Do we idolize that person? Is it possible to preserve memories through art? Does art help or support an illusion we created anew, or is that actually the entire point - to create the image that we want to see?' (The sentences on the drawings represent parts of text from my family’s old documents in the function of creating new seeing.)
The works are also based on the J. Bergers book Ways of Seeing, especially chapter 1 where Berger starts by trying to explain the relationship between words and what we see. He points out that seeing and recognition come before words. It is seeing that establishes our place in the world, but we use words to explain this world. Despite this he argues there is always a distinction between what we see and what we know. Having established that we see first and then use words to explain the world, i.e. what we know, he then goes on to say what we know or believe affects the way we see things. This makes it a dynamic relationship; it may start with seeing and recognition, but develops into a system in which our past experience or knowledge changes the way we see things.