Memorabilia are not only objects—concert tickets, photographs, letters, keepsakes—but also fragments of memory, gestures, words, and feelings that we cling to, reimagine, or transform. For artists and creative thinkers, memorabilia often becomes raw material: the ephemera that bridges past and present, personal and collective history, lived experience and artistic practice.
In times of constant digital turnover, memorabilia challenges us to think about what we hold onto, what we archive, and how we reframe personal or cultural histories through creative practice. From nostalgia to critical reflection, from intimate souvenirs to ironic collectables, this theme opens a wide space for interpretation.
Artist: Nathalie Leung Shing
@Natflixly
https://natflixly.com/
Description: This handstitched album holds more than photographs; it carries the weight of memory and the residue of neglect. On Mont Choisy Beach in Mauritius, I gathered 1,700 discarded cigarette butts—small, toxic fragments scarring the sand. Preserved as fragile memorabilia, they are not trophies but reminders of traces left behind and of beauty threatened. My portrait on the cover anchors the work in time and place, a witness to what was collected, remembered, and transformed. Alongside photographs, my hand embroidered basket crafted with these cigarette filters turns waste into testimony, memory into presence.
Artist: Francesca Alaimo
https://www.francescaalaimoartist.com
DESCRIPTION: Sewing And Stitching My Storyboard is a snapshot journey through my gender and body dysphoria from my childhood to now. Pinned into starched wax-coated paper that resembles a skin or a rugged terrain, are the delicate pages of my mother’s notebook from 1945, where I have superimposed my thoughts and self-portraits. Old photographs of myself, alone or with my beloved ones are pinned to the paper, and painted images of theatrical figures are sewn to it, seemingly reminding us of a mending ritual. Like a storyboard of my own life, the paper is filled with memories and images of trans-formations, documenting my experience of disconnection between the seen and the unseen and my path along my own gender questioning and discovery. My mother’s lingering presence connects the past to the present, a silent witness of what I create out of what I see and feel.
Artist: Claudia Ungersbäck
www.claudiaungersbaeck.com
Description: Shakespeare 2020 digital print
One of my former boyfriends left a skull ashtray in my flat when he moved out. I kept the ashtray for sentimental reasons until my next and former flatmate adopted the skull and gave it a name, “Shakespeare“. I found that perfect for a digital print so I made the work. My flatmate moved out, took the skull with him and what remains to me is a print without sentimentality. “Shakespeare" can be seen as an early sketch of my AINT COPY P Series (around 2022).
Artist: Core Sway
www.coresway.art
Description: Core Sway constructs material palimpsests from discarded fragments — tickets, textiles, clippings — embedding traces of urban memory into dense painterly fields. His practice explores themes of identity, fragmentation, and the persistence of cultural noise in the city. A mixed-media artist with a 3D aesthetic, Core Sway captures the visual DNA of the environment around him, layering found ephemera, street iconography, and cultural fragments into dense, tactile compositions. Drawing on flyers, market stall packaging, transport tickets, and pop culture debris, his pieces map the chaos and beauty of urban life.
For Core Sway’s most recent pieces of work, the focus has been on recycling, rejuvenation and mental health. This has involved collage and mixed media work with a 3D aesthetic on canvas using materials previously accumulated over time and some items picked up that very day, including old newspaper clippings, stickers, postcards, plastic shopping bags, trading cards, an old filter from a tumble dryer, an oven glove and a yogurt pot amongst other items…
Artist: Ann Kopka
https://artcontemporary.co.uk/
Description: 'All That Glistens’ is a mixed media collage on canvas. (size 76 x 51 cm). It is made up of hundreds of tiny items, memorabilia and fragments of discarded objects with no intrinsic value. Yet each tiny object is loaded with personal memories far outweighing any monetary worth. Beads from old necklaces made of wood, glass, plastic and ceramics. Some given to me when I was a child by my mother, saved from her own childhood. Necklaces and bracelets given to me for being best bridesmaid. Discarded jewellery given to me to play with and dress my dolls. I remember keeping my beads in little tins and Du Maurier cigarette cases lined with cotton wool, taking some to school to swap with classmates. Broken bits of jewellery and coloured plastic gemstones from a toy metal crown. Buttons cut from old cardigans, dresses, shirts or coats reminding me of the clothes they came from and remembering who wore them. Embroidery threads, silks, sequins, delicate strips of fabric from clothes my mother made, lace from nightdresses and dressing table sets. Safety pins, metal studs, rings and fasteners from my mother's dressmaking days. Tiny pieces of decorated copper and other items from craft classes. Scraps of found papers, tissue papers used for present wrapping, sweet and chocolate wrappers ,teabag papers. All these items of memorabilia and many more were painstakingly glued to the surface of the canvas taking many hours over several months. I could only work for a hour or so at a time as I carefully handled each tiny memory with a pair of tweezers and glued it into place. I worried I would run out of material but I had enough tiny objects to complete two canvases. Brushing the finished work with gold acrylic transformed the surface giving it a sense of harmony and cohesiveness. I can still see my memories but on public display I notice that viewers interpret ‘All That Glistens’ in different ways often provoking their own personal memories.
Artist: Leya Batchelor
Description: This work is titled 'Revisiting', it explores my childhood home through memory. Displaying its
state before and during a remodel that transformed it into something else. These images are
over eight years old and were taken in colour but have since been edited into black and white to
represent memory and loss. Each images explores different parts of my childhood and
memories that will forever be with me, even though this is no longer my home it will always be a
part of me. This is the reason I have titled this body of work revisiting as I will forever be brought
back to this place through memories, it is the first place I ever recognized as home.
Artist: Lostnorfound
Memories, objects and conversations. After the death of my dad to alcohol related liver failure. I began to construct a series tableau vivants inside handmade birdboxes that depict the memories of moments and discussions between us. The three boxes are titled 'The Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit ABV 43%' and form part of a bigger body of work called 'Journey to the Kings Ward'.
Artist: Josh Huxham
These scans belong to the Materiality of Slides pillar of Conversations with Light, a project that revisits my late Grandad’s archive. Here, the slides, their worn box, and the mechanical viewer are treated not only as carriers of images but as objects marked by time. Dust, handwriting, frayed mounts, and the residue of touch speak to their physical lives beyond representation. By placing these scanned artefacts against deep black, their ghosted transparencies and fragile details are held in stark relief. What emerges is less about content than presence — a meditation on how photographs endure as lived objects, fragile yet resilient.
Artist: Kate McDonnell
www.katemcdonnell.co.uk
Description: Redacted greetings cards are suspended from cords across a gallery space. What should be a jolly, celebratory scene is sombre. These cards have been collected for over 60 years – the life of a family. Birthdays, thank yous and Valentine sentiments are all here, and if you look closely you can see traces of lost emotions rendered moot by time, death and family division.
Artist: The Naked Artist
www.thenakedartist.co.uk
Description: For the past twenty years, I’ve been gathering words, carefully cut from the pages of old books, and keeping them safe until they are needed. Each word is chosen by the quiet compass of my mood, carrying the weight of memories and moments. They are precious fragments of my inner world, giving shape to my thoughts and allowing me to speak through the language of art.
Artist: Ellie Garraway
https://www.firejar.co.uk/
Description: Watershed... … or turning point.
A cherished calligraphy sketchbook belonging to my late father was rescued from a sodden portfolio caught in a flood following a burst pipe in my studio. This precious piece of memorabilia features my father's beautiful writing and the random but characterful words and phrases he used in his calligraphy practice book.
Its pages, carefully dried out and waxed, form the content of this book artwork, the structure of which follows the evolution of the book from scroll to concertina to stitched binding. The outer scroll was the last paper in the pad and bears the memory of the watery tide marks left by the soaked board back.
This piece marks the turning point brought about by the actual ‘watershedding’ following this studio water incident which, together with a recent trip to Japan, has seen a more profound shift in my art practice. It has also led to my questioning what counts as memorabilia. What should we be keeping when we accumulate so much stuff, and what would we rescue first from the floodwater?
Book structure: scroll, concertina, and coptic bindings, with other stitch binding variations.
Calligraphy practice sheets by Gerald Garraway.
Artist: Xinan Yang
https://xinanyang.wixsite.com/mysite
Description: My work reflects on how family photographs—once intimate keepsakes of belonging—become displaced objects, circulating in flea markets and online auctions. These orphaned images, fragile fragments of memory, hold traces of lives that may no longer be remembered by anyone. Through painting, I reframe these photographs as both personal and collective memorabilia, transforming them into spaces where absence and presence converge.
In reimagining these found images, I seek to slow down the fleeting consumption of memory in a digital age. Rich colour and intimate scale imbue the paintings with tenderness, inviting viewers to reflect on the vulnerability of memory and the fragility of family bonds. For me, memorabilia is not just an object to be archived, but a living conduit through which we negotiate identity, belonging, and loss across time and culture.
Artist: Suzie Smith
www.suziesmithdesigns.co.uk
Description: ‘The Memory of what Remains’ explores the connection between memory and the objects we choose to keep safe. Inspired by memory boxes and my own personal collection, I examine how memories shift, evolve, and fade—especially in the shadow of grief. These objects once held certainty, yet over time they blur, their meanings softening or changing completely.
Alongside these physical traces, I’ve become drawn to scent—how it can collapse time and reconnect us to moments we thought were lost. A sudden smell can bring the past rushing back, fleeting but vivid. It’s this intangible, involuntary response I try to echo in the work.
Working with clear glass and sandblasting, I explore the balance between memory’s permanence and its fragility. Glass can preserve and protect, but it can also distort, fracture, and obscure. Its transparency leaves room—for light, for reflection, and for interpretation.
It’s less about the viewer knowing my exact memory, and more about offering an opening for their own. These forms become quiet invitations—spaces where personal histories, feelings, and associations can surface.
This work gently pushes at the boundary between what is held and what is felt, the visible and the sensed. It asks: do the objects we keep truly carry fragments of the past? Or do memories live within us—unfixed, always shifting, yet never entirely gone?
Artist: Anna Hutchinson
https://www.theannahutchinson.com/
Description: This assemblage, Breaking the Mould, uses vintage and personal objects to question the expectations of girlhood. At its centre is an antique brick mould, overflowing with my communion cardigan, hand-knitted by my mother. An illustration of the day I was born, rose-petal rosary beads, and badges from pivotal moments of resistance surround it. A strip of hot pink satin ribbon, not a keepsake but a stand-in for the sweetness and tidiness girls were expected to embody, lies untied. The mould is both literal and metaphorical. It is a container of memory, tradition, and cultural weight. From childhood I cut against it: short-haired, football-playing, objecting to “schoolboys” tickets, refusing to accept gendered limitations. In adulthood I carried that refusal into choices about religion, marriage, family, and politics. Each relic in this assemblage maps that journey of autonomy. Rather than nostalgia, these vintage fragments serve as evidence of breaking away without shattering anything. They show how I shaped a life outside the neat pink ribbon that was meant to bind it.
Artist: Nadia Kissel
@kisselevanadia
https://www.nadiakisseleva.com, ULR https://sites.google.com/view/nadia-kisseleva-new/
Description: “Gunia Project” took shape during my move from one country to another. In leaving behind my family, friends, and familiar surroundings, I could bring very little with me as tangible evidence of those emotional connections. This period became a time of reflection on my life, my family, and my friendships. The form of the work was dictated by materials available “at hand”: packing cartons, boxes, sack material, necklaces, embroidery, and the small objects I wanted to carry with me as memorabilia or remnants of the past. Some of these objects became part of the artwork itself. The sack material, gunia in Swahili,- served as a base for the collected items and for my thoughts. Covered with a layer of papier-mâché, the works embody memory as layered, fragile, and enduring.
Artist: Beccy Ware
outsiderartclub.com
Description
Infant School Toy Cupboard is a freestanding sculpture based on the 1970's toy 'Octons' by Galt. The octagon shapes are cut from plywood and can be assembled at whim. The shapes are decorated with digitally manipulated images from the artist's childhood which show the wear of repeated building. The piece plays with the idea of unreliable memories worn away with time.
Artist: Christiane Zschommler
https://www.christianezschommler.co.uk/
From the project Forgotten Doctrine ( since 2024)
In Forgotten Doctrine, memorabilia are not static keepsakes but contested fragments—objects and images that carry ideological residue. Rather than preserving them intact, I transform and reframe them, disrupting their readability to question how memory and history persist. This approach to memorabilia is not as tokens of nostalgia, but as unstable carriers of history. Through embedding, sealing, and re-scaling, these works probe how souvenirs of dictatorship are reactivated as sites of memory, fragility, and inquiry.
Artist: Kayla DuBois
Description: "October".
An important part of what I do is notice what remains after loss. This captures what is left after a house fire. Is that all there is?