Two Part Neon. Permanent Installation. Commisioned by Situations for Wonders of Weston, Weston Super Mare, 2010.

Two statements ‘The Things You Can’t Remember’ and ‘The Things You Can’t Forget’ are illuminated in blue neon twenty-four hours a day on the façade of the pavilion. The Winter Gardens and Pavilion on this site in Weston Super Mare, formerly Roger’s Field, was opened on 14th July, 1927 and continues as a venue for tea dances, competitions and weddings, alongside the more contemporary conference services.
 
Etchells’ works in neon often take a narrative form or conceptual proposition and operate by placing unresolvable ideas or language propositions into public space. “The work seems to make sense at first glance,” the artist suggests, “but there's often something in its apparent simplicity which creates an undertow. These neon works are concerned with opening space for the viewer, with the emphasis on the addressee, rather than on speaking subject implied by the work itself.”
 
With an eye to the town of Weston and acting as a sign over the Winter Gardens, Winter Piece points to these locations as places in which momentous and ordinary events collide. Etchells was also interested in the seaside as a space of contemplation. “I was thinking about the strange state of contemplation, reflection and reverie that the sea invites for many people. In the context of daytrips or holidays,  there is something about the desire visit this huge, expansive natural thing, which becomes a cypher for all kinds of mental processes ‒ memory, the ebb and flow of time and the possibilities of the future.”
 
The sign directly addresses the passer-by on the seafront, inviting us to consider the question of what stays with us from the past and what is forgotten over time. The things we can’t remember and the things we can’t forget embody experience. By situating each phrase aside the portico of the pavilion, the artist emphasises the binary division between these aspects of experience.  As the artist suggests though, “the work gives a kind of impossible physical dimension or materiality to the complex, entangled processes of memory.” Presenting the viewer with a provocative artistic 'as if'”, the work, he suggests, “both raises and questions the idea of a solid division between what is remembered and what is forgotten”.

Tim Etchells' other project for Situations, Wonders of Weston - Shelter Piece - here .

More general info on Wonders of Weston here .