After Tomorrow at Sunrise, presented at the George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (Parkville), developed through the inaugural Artist-in-Residence Award at the 2020 VCA Graduate Exhibition.

The ways in which we acquire, collect, and remember experiences can take many forms. For artist Lachlan Stonehouse, the still and moving image play a central role in the construction of narrative—both fictional and true—explored through a series of collages.

The premise of Stonehouse’s work emerges from observations of the external world alongside recordings of internal, psychological spaces. These fragments are pieced together as traces of the real, filling in gaps through reconstructed memories and sensations—those lost within film scenes, family photographs, or materials that linger in a desk drawer. The selected imagery speaks to specific moments in time, forming a fragile archive of memory. Through moving image and collage, the works offer a sense of stability, momentarily solidifying fleeting experiences and slippery recollections as time passes.

Desire and despair unfold within the artist’s own fictionalised realities, guiding an exploration of how memories are formed, mediated, and relayed. This inquiry is closely tied to Stonehouse’s interest in cinema and the mechanisms of narrative construction.

At first glance, the works appear to function as attempts to decipher the modes of storytelling at play, and the lenses through which we interpret our experiences of people, objects, places, and time.

Images courtesy of Astrid Mulder