Pilgrimage and Memory: L'Asilo Martini. Cavagnolo, Italy. June 2001

The theme of the exhibition is summed up in the introduction to the catalogue by the curator Victor de Circasia."We cannot perceive the deep intensity of the soul of a man in search for meaning, but undoubtedly we can reveal the anxiety and the intention to achieve a goal in life beyond that of complying with his destiny. The succession of night and day, as man passes through his life, he builds up a conscious response to the act of living and it is in this action that memory plays a role of awareness and differentiation.For the exhibition, Statham created a piece of music made of 28 separate tracks, each track entering after 30 seconds and layering and combining with the previous track. The music was made up of found sounds collected over a year from different locations, as diverse as a field in Spain to the sound from the interior church housing the Turin shroud. At first one can differentiate between the sounds but eventually they merge into a huge sonic collage confusing as a remembered sound suddenly makes itself felt again. This was combined with 28 images from the painter Daisy Cook. These images were abstract recollections of the Australian desert and merged together as each new track of music appeared. Added to this were old photographs found in plastic bags from Statham's days touring with former Bauhaus vocalist Peter Murphy. Locations and dates had long since faded in my memory and with it all attachments to that particular time.