Statement on Imagined Vinyl Album Cover Art series 

My practice has a focus on nostalgia for time and place, its associated idealism, melancholy beauty and bittersweet impossibility. Employing a range of symbolic elements, both personally relevant and picked at random, I create ambiguity-filled collage-like compositions that attempt to emulate the erratic and senseless nature of dreams, and the reimagined histories they present to us, like tableaux of a memory cache. 

These works form part of an ongoing series exploring ideas of dreams and memory, as imagined vinyl album cover artworks. I grew up surrounded by the images and long songs of the progressive rock era, thanks to my dad’s love of the genre. As a result, I developed a strange nostalgia for this time in history of seemingly unbridled creativity, despite not having lived it myself. I am interested in both real and unreal memory, and how over-romanticisation of the past, while tantamount to folly, has perennial appeal. In the common square format of vinyl cover sleeves, I found an ideal template on which to examine these ideas, and give new permanence to something of lessening ubiquity.

Throughout this series, islands and floating rock fragments exist just out of reach, flowers and other organic objects become symbols of past narratives, while objects melt into others, referencing the dreaming subconscious. The vinyl cover format and borrowing of real-world album cover design pull the ethereal themes back to human culture, while the lack of accompanying music lend them a vagueness, like an obscure, suspended historicity. 

Dominique Merven, 2017