The Unforgetting – Peter Watkins

In February 1993, Peter Watkins’ mother walked from the beach at Zandvoort (Netherlands) into the North Sea until she met her death by drowning.

“The Unforgetting” is thus the artist’s exploration of trauma, loss, and shared family memory, all woven into a series of works that have been created over several years, and now for the first time come together in the form of a single book.

At its core, the project explores the tragic loss of her mother to suicide after an intense period of mental instability and internment in various psychiatric institutions.

The personal charge with which these images are made, however, remains masked, veiled encouraging a dialogue between the universal and the personal; the recurring motif of suspension and weightlessness comes to contrast the anchored, definitive quality of the still life works.

These assemblages of objects have a totemic and monumental aspect; isolated from a larger whole, their imagination through the representational capacity of photography moves them into the realm of the associative, the artifactual, and positions them as fragments of evidence.