Ragged Memories

Ragged Memories

Ragged Memories

By: Holly Milligan, 2003
Medium: cast bronze
Cast by: Lunts Casting
Edition: 15

Category:

Holly Milligan was born in 19??. After taking a degree in fine art valuation and working in a gallery in London’s west end, she decided to pursue her own talent and enrolled at the City and Guilds of London Art School. After completing a year’s foundation at the school, where she was awarded a prize as the outstanding fine arts student, Milligan began a post-graduate diploma in sculpture. While on this course she entered the 2003 BAMS Student Medal Project and was awarded the Worshipful Company of Founders’ grand first prize for her piece, Ragged Memories. Married with a young son, the artist now lives in Bermuda and works in mixed media as an artist in her own right. Milligan’s prize-winning medal, Ragged Memories, is now being issued by BAMS. The artist writes: ‘Memory plays an important part in my work. I’m interested in its destructive power and how that can stifle, even suffocate life. I thought about how medals were the physical embodiment of a past event, of a memory. I was reading Dickens’s Great Expectations, and I was fascinated with how Miss Havisham had become enslaved by her memory and had constructed her life as a monument to her failure. On one side the lace represents Miss Havisham’s memory, beautiful, but torn and frayed. On the reverse, this hint of decay is confirmed by the quotation. Pins are a recurring motif in my work, contrasting their utilitarian purpose with the darker sense of being pinned down, as by past memories.’