Traces: Between Presence and Absence

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Traces hint at loss, a past that no longer exists. It is a universal experience. This work invites visitors to recognize the ephemeral imprints left behind by passing moments. Through acts of shaping, unmaking, and reshaping, I navigate the boundaries between presence and absence.

 

The becoming of a trace, I work with fabric to explore the fragile terrain of memory, loss, and transformation. Using mannequins as a base, I wrap fabric soaked in a mixture of glue, plaster, and relief paste, allowing it to harden before ripping it away. What remains is an impression of a body; distorted, fragmented, and later reassembled into new figurative forms.

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I explore the becoming of a trace. Is it in the violent moment of the rupture, when the fabric is torn? Is it in the inevitable distortion when the original is lost? Or does it occur later in the laborious process, when the distorted form is reshaped into a figure that resembles the lost so-called original?

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Home is ever fleeting, something we carry within us as it perpetually slips beyond reach. Traces speak to the experience of migration, of being ripped, distorted, reshaped, and reassembled by movement. In the tearing away from familiar form, there are echoes of leaving a home, of the distortion that occurs when one is displaced, and the new forms we find ourselves in. The fabric becomes skin and shelter, holding memory as we reassemble into new identities.