In Skin and Matter
Hillvale Gallery

The artist’s practice is backgrounded by the harrowing experience of a shed fire on her parent’s property in 2018. Over 40 years of familial objects, heirlooms and rolls of analogue photographic films were impacted by the fire. Objects and photographs rendered unrecognisable: their priceless function as stimuli intensifying the intangible quality of memory. 

Grief is echoed in each gesture when reaching for the destroyed. Returning to the debris in an iterative attempt to reconcile the loss of familial material history, themes of permanence and temporality surface. Alongside the layered requiem of materials, the artist documents herself as a vessel of grief embodied. Cast and documented, the debris is set with the body in an alternate archive: a synecdochal reimagining and rewriting of material history.

Looping back in repetitive shapes and forms, slippages of familiarity and ambiguity, texture and form, shifting viewpoints of body and debris culminate in a study of presence and absence.