BODY FOSSILS

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

I’ve been returning to a set of analogue colour photographs from the 1990s—prints I’ve carried with me for years. 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. Trying to find what a photograph could become.

Now I meet them again, differently. I pour pigment onto their surfaces—watercolour, ink—letting another layer of time enter. What felt like searching for resolution and balance has shifted to something else: a returning, a reworking, an opening.

I’m no longer someone that works in the darkroom. I work instead with what I notice and carry with me from where I live now: 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. The flattened bits on the streets by my house. 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.