What are memories but stories that take shape in our minds and evolve over time? And are they truly accurate depictions of what happened, or do we tend to fill in the gaps with our own imaginings? In Kuala Lumpur-based fashion designer-visual artist Joshua Fitton’s second solo exhibition, Shadows In Time, now showing at The Back Room gallery until July 28, his personal memories take the form of broken ceramic plates that are made anew with intricately detailed ink drawings filling the spaces in between. If his debut solo last year, What Dreams May Come, with its collection of a hundred ceramic eggs, explored potential futures, Shadows In Time digs into the past, seen through the hazy lens of different moments in time. “Each piece is like a tunnel back in time, zooming into an experience or a memory of a story from the past,” says Fitton during a recent interview at the Kuala Lumpur gallery.
“I was intrigued by the concept of storytelling – the telling and retelling of stories, and how when they’re told, and retold, and retold, they change over time, bit by bit,” he adds. Fitton, 37, then decided to pair his desire to explore this idea with his existing interest in blue-and-white ceramics. Piecing the exhibition together “I’ve always had this obsession with blue and white Chinese ceramics, especially the ones that were found in shipwrecks, and the history behind them,” he says, sharing bits of background here and there about various patterns, such as the Pe.