ON REFLECTION by Lulah Ellender

Visiting a local lantern display recently I found one installation particularly magical: a scattering of small, illuminated paper treehouses dotting the edges of a pond. It wasn’t so much the structures but the way they were perfectly mirrored on the water’s flat surface that captured my attention. It seemed as if the houses were simultaneously floating in two worlds: suspended in the trees and reflected in the inky water, where they shimmered fluidly to life. Then there was a third dimension: the darkness below, a vertiginous void. It was captivating. I lingered, lost in the blurring of worlds as onlookers snapped photos and pacified tired children with the promise of hot dogs.

This moment of confused perception reminded me of Monet’s Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond. A huge triptych, the edges of the outer panels depict dark, green depths while the centre glows with light. Another dance between surface and depth, clarity and distortion. Smudges of sky, flowers and water dissolve together in a borderless, glinting wash of reflection and shadow.

This painting invites us to linger in uncertainty. To be engulfed by it. But unlike the installation there’s no fixed horizon or edges, no comforting solidity. Instead, Monet asks us to consider the complexity of perception itself. What do we actually see, and how much of this is determined by our viewpoint and our moment in time?

Monet’s probing of perception echoes the subjectivity and mutability of memory. Like his watery surfaces or the pond dotted with lanterns, memory reflects both what once was, and the way we construct the past through the act of recalling it. Every memory is a memory of a memory, like a fairground hall of mirrors. Details are magnified, blurred, erased. This distortion gives memory a creative force, allowing the past to shift and change as we reinterpret it.

My memories are often drenched in longing and loss. It’s as if I’m a photographer dipping negatives in trays of nostalgia-infused developing solution. I wait for images to appear, then peg them neatly on a line. I relish the ache of it, but fear its cloying grip.

The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek ‘nostos’, meaning to return home, and ‘álgos’, meaning pain. It’s a word that’s rooted in place – or rather, the lack of place. In the 17th Century, Swiss soldiers were said to have died from homesickness, such was the intensity of the condition and memory’s tricksy way of idealising a lost past. Yet for many displaced or exiled people, nostalgia can be a powerful means of preserving identity and a sense of belonging across generations.

While researching my last book, I came across an essay by poet Denise Riley in which she declared she’d ‘set fire to nostalgia,’ rejecting it as sentimental. This fiery obliteration contrasts with our watery reflections. Yet in her later work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, written after her son’s death, her perspective became more nuanced, reflecting on nostalgia’s complexity and the ways it shapes our sense of self.

For Riley, nostalgia isn’t just a longing for a lost past but a complex entanglement with time. In grief, time seems to collapse, the past and present colliding – just as Monet’s reflections trouble the boundaries of surface and depth. In his pond, as in Riley’s words, the past isn’t a static image but a dynamic process of becoming, a photo in a constant state of apparition. Memory is not a balm but a process of development. It shapes and remakes our sense of self.

Monet painted his water lilies late in his life. We could see these works as the abstractions of failing eyes. But the loose brushwork isn’t a result of his physical limitations, it’s a deliberate celebration of ambiguity. There are no fixed forms or clear edges; instead he invites us to see beyond the literal, to find beauty in the undefined and impermanent. The water’s surface becomes a place of transformation, where sky and earth merge. We are left gazing at the ripples.

Reflection – in a pond or in memory – is active. It blends truth and imagination, altering what it contains and offering a new perspective. The lantern-lit treehouses, like Monet’s lilies, are more than their physical forms. They are reminders that what we see, and what we recall, is shaped as much by the act of looking as by the thing itself. This fluidity is the essence of being: always changing, ephemeral, and deeply alive.