HILLARY YOUNGLOVE

Sediments of Time: The Archive of Ordinary Things

I make archaeological sites for the future.

For more than thirty years I have collected the physical remnants of a life: letters exchanged with friends and lovers, handmade papers, nineteenth-century book pages, articles of clothing, leaves, moss, found objects, cyanotypes from my garden, together with layers of acrylic and pastel. Individually these materials seem ordinary. Together they become evidence—fragments of lives that continue to speak long after the moment has passed.

As a teenager, I wanted to become an archaeologist. That fascination never left me. Instead of excavating buried civilizations, I construct new strata from the accumulated traces of contemporary life. Each work begins from scratch. Piece by piece, layer upon layer, I build expansive surfaces that resemble both paintings and excavations—tapestries of memory whose histories are embedded rather than illustrated.

My understanding of archaeology was profoundly shaped by studying ancient Rome, where every generation built upon the remains of another. Beneath every city lies another city. Time is not linear but sedimentary. That realization transformed the way I think about painting. Every surface holds another beneath it; every mark carries the memory of what came before.

These works are collaborations across decades. Former students, friends, lovers, family members, and strangers all inhabit them through letters, gestures, photographs, botanical impressions, and objects they once touched. Their histories merge with my own until authorship becomes collective. The work reminds me that our lives are never made alone—they are layered from countless encounters, relationships, and shared moments.

Everything can become raw material. A moth eaten silk scarf I once wore. A pressed leaf. Moss gathered on a walk. A scrap of handwritten correspondence. A torn curtain from my 1st house. Nothing is insignificant once time has touched it.

The circle returns again and again throughout my work. It appeared long before I understood why. As I grow older, it has become a meditation on the cyclical nature of time and the cosmos. The circle suggests infinity without beginning or end, wholeness without completion. It recalls celestial bodies, ancient cosmologies, tree rings, ripples on water, and the recurring rhythms of birth, loss, decay, and renewal. It reminds me that memory is not something we leave behind but something we continually move through.

Shadows, vines, botanical forms, and small explosions of light also recur throughout the work. They emerge intuitively, as if uncovered rather than invented, suggesting that nature and memory obey similar laws—both persist through cycles of growth, disappearance, and return.

The process is slow and intensely physical. Thousands of fragments are layered, buried, painted, sanded, and revealed again. Over weeks and months, repetition dissolves conscious thought and I enter a state of reverie. The work begins to guide itself. Unexpected relationships surface. My subconscious becomes another collaborator, revealing connections that could never have been planned.

I think of these works as contemporary relics—archives of affection, loss, friendship, place, and time. They preserve not only my own history but the accumulated presence of everyone whose lives have intersected with mine. They ask what future generations might discover about us from the fragments we leave behind, and whether memory itself can become a material.

Ultimately, my work is an act of quiet excavation. It honors what is overlooked, discarded, and ephemeral, transforming the evidence of everyday life into enduring objects that invite viewers to uncover their own stories within the layers.