Field of Traces
Structure and material hold memory
My work examines the evidence
01 TRACES OF MEMORY
02 ENDURANCE OF CARE
03 CONDITONS OF ABSENCE
04 ACTS OF REPAIR
05 NOTIONS OF BELONGING
06 MAKING FUTURES
At some point, we encounter grief, loss and absence.
They are inevitable, but absence is not simply the disappearance of something. It is a change in the relationship between what remains and what has moved beyond it.
Within this, buildings can appear still while lives, relationships and meanings continue to circle around and through them. They hold the evidence of those movements: in spaces no longer used, marks left by occupation, altered fabric and the trace of memories attached to what is no longer present.
The lyric from Surreal AI’s The House That Waited for Us captures this shift from disappearance to time:
“The house didn’t move, the years did.”
The building remains, while the years alter everything gathered around it. Absence is therefore not only profound emptiness, but a continuing presence within what survives.
We cannot repair absence away, but perhaps we can learn to recognise how it changes what remains — and what is waiting for us, still held in place after the loss.