A Signpost to Somewhere Forgotten - La Gazette #12
“The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
”
Hello friend,
In a large inland city in France—nowhere near the sea—I once came across a peculiar signpost. It had all the formal features of a standard street sign: blue metal, arrow-shaped, official. But instead of pointing toward Paris or Lyon, it directed passersby to somewhere enigmatic: “A seaside town whose name I forgot.”
It stopped me in my tracks. The phrase felt like a line torn from a fable—absurd, poetic, and strangely true. A wave of nostalgia rose up, surprising and inexplicable. There was no logic to the feeling, and yet—I understood it completely.
Memory doesn’t always arrive with sharp outlines or exact coordinates. Sometimes it’s an atmosphere. A shape of colour or light. A whisper of salt wind in a place where there’s no sea at all. The signpost reminded me of how memory exists beyond logic. It loops through us, misplaced but never lost.
When I created Orange Hills, I wasn’t thinking of the ocean—and yet, it arrived anyway. I live in Alexandra, deep in Central Otago, surrounded by dry hills. The sea is not only far away—it’s incongruent with the landscape. And yet, when I look out my kitchen window at this particular white house with a flat blue roof, it feels like the shoreline could be just beyond the next slope. A detail misplaced by reality but perfectly placed by memory.
This feeling—a dream geography made real—is layered into Orange Hills. The house you see in the composition is real, but its echo reaches much further. Back to a beach in Argentina. A childhood summer. A shipwreck seen through the eyes of a small girl. And also forward—to you, the viewer. Your own forgotten signposts. Your own internal coastlines.
Art doesn’t require literal recognition. It only asks that we follow the feeling. That we pause when something within us says, you’ve been here before—even if you don’t remember when.
In this way, every painting is a compass. Not to point you somewhere new—but somewhere deeply known.
Thank you for reading.
warm hugs from a French summer.
Marion V-W.
