Polaroid

Running in the park, my mind loosens and memories start to shuffle into the foreground. Perhaps a familiar movement from a small dog bounding beside me, or a shaft of light, penetrating through the bare branches at a specific angle, stirs something. For some reason recollections appear as photographic stills, not moving images, their colours enhanced and laced with the romance of discovery.

Once begun, polaroid bright memories flick through my mind - is it my mind, or something more instinctive? Like the scent of a baby's head - the slideshow set in train, running it's course. Experiences of movies long forgotten, so I thought, everyday images of life from their habitual angles, the strange deja vu experienced when you pass the same place everyday, and everyday it's the same and also slightly different. Memories lie on top of each other, a cross-section of the sedimentary layers of life as lived.

The trick is to recognise these unexpected moments when you plunge into the depths of everything you've ever seen, felt, thought or known. And realising, begin to wonder about how these moments make you. Each one is another layer of memories (or unmemories?) - even sleeping our dreams add to the mix.

How do these experiences contribute to who we are? Is anything, once it has passed through our minds (no matter how glancingly) ever truly discarded, or is it just filed away? And those moments, when you rediscover just a fraction of the experiences you don't even remember having, provide a tantalising glimpse of what lies beneath.