BODY FOSSILS

Mixed media – c-prints, watercolour pigment, ink, carving.

memory on another memory on another

I’ve been returning to a set of analogue colour photographs from the 1990s. I held onto them, moved them from place to place, without fully knowing why. Back then, in the darkroom, I worked in small shifts…slight changes in time, density, colour. Making versions that were almost the same. Circling something. Making so many photographs.

Now I meet photography again, differently. I pour pigment onto the surfaces of the old photos, letting another layer of time enter. Something else is here: a returning, a reworking, but also an opening. I work with what I carry with me: the memory of bright green of moss and fern from an early morning walk in the forest, the movement of water along the shore, low tide. Bits of metal and construction material flattened by traffic on the streets. The unfurling seedling, play of sun, shadow, the hug of one thing with another: polypore, aphid, shell, bone, muck.

Working this way one memory is placed against another. Letting them blur. Pouring memory onto memory.

This work is part of the project, Body Fossils, a regular shared-studio-practice-at-a-distance, over at STUDIES FOR. As a small group of international artists that meet up regularly (because it feels really good to work alongside one another), this year we chose the theme of Body Fossils to focus on deep time, interbeing, and impermanence.