Depicting things

Depicting Things (2021) is an installation of pinhole photographs mounted to light boxes. The images are arranged to form an intricate network of distorted visuals connected hap-hazardly to their power supply. Each photograph was exposed on deliberately “traumatised” photographic paper which was scratched, bitten, folded, torn, and pinched. These interactions with the photo paper allowed their surface to actively disrupt the depiction of the scene and to become a visible agent in the formation of the image.

The work uses this process as a metaphor for the complex relationships between objects, bodies, and memory. By allowing the photographic surface to distort and “garble” what it records, the images reflect the fractured, layered, and unstable nature of lived experience. The damaged paper mirrors how memory and trauma are carried materially and bodily, complicating any singular or stable representation of reality.