The Color of Memory

I remember a drive through the high plains of Wyoming, somewhere near Laramie, where the sun began to dip and the entire world shifted its tone. My passenger, a woman named Sarah who had spent her life in the city, suddenly fell silent. She wasn’t looking at the road or the map; she was watching the way the light bruised the horizon, turning the dry grass into something that felt like a half-remembered dream. We didn’t speak for an hour. We didn’t need to. There is a specific kind of magic in those moments when the world stops being a place of utility—a place to get from here to there—and becomes a place of pure feeling. It is as if the landscape itself is trying to tell us that reality is not just what we can touch, but what we can imagine. Why is it that we only seem to truly see the world when we are passing through it at speed?

Lydia Sutcliffe has captured this exact feeling in her work titled Purple Sky Dreams. It feels like a postcard sent from a memory you didn’t know you had. Does this scene remind you of a place you once left behind?