Faced with a scattering of ceramic flat stones, as in Primal Memory, or upright LEDF stones in Transcircle, your immediate response is to try and work them out not go beyond them.
An exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York moves him to reflect on America's uneasy embrace of Surrealism: "American art in general, whose primal memory is of the encounter with a hostile wilderness, takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism".
What the artist has achieved here is to inject into the austere masculine grandeur of a neolithic stone circle a feminine note with pastel colours and smooth plastic surfaces, though it looks worryingly like an installation of lava lamps".Flat Stone" (2007) and "Primal Memory" (2004), two reconstructions of Jomon ceremonial spaces, are more coolly academic.
My primal memory of the show is of Dave, in a Velcro suit, getting tossed up onto a wall from a catapult — although, when I looked at a clip recently, I saw that my fond memories had exaggerated a mere mini-trampoline.
From this primal memory Drabble spools both backwards and onwards in an extended meditation on the life and death of Auntie Phyl, our collective longing for tokens of the pre-industrial countryside and, of course, the important question of whether the proper way to do a jigsaw is to start with the corners first.
On his father's estate he lived the dandified life of a country squire but already his obsession with birds, which he had carried with him from France -- and perhaps from some primal memory of his Caribbean childhood -- dominated his thoughts.
I had no idea what Armenian food was, nor could I pick the place out on a map, but the rack of lamb remains one of the primal memories for me.
It is as if the land were recalling some primal memories of its former self, as if the trees had migrated back through time to reach their ancestral homes.
I'd like to say the panicked shaky-cam footage running through night-time forests triggered primal memories of our evolutionary ancestors fleeing jungle predators, but I suspect that wasn't the whole story.
He's always loved movies; he traces "Snow White and the Huntsman" back to "primal memories of seeing one of the re-releases of Disney's 'Snow White'" as a toddler.
