Selected previous project

A Still Life Full of Surprises investigates place as a layered archive composed of material traces, mediated images, and temporal processes. Drawing on archival photographs, maps, fossils, and site-specific recordings, the work approaches memory not as a personal narrative but as a structural condition embedded in landscape, matter, and representation.

Central to the project are over two hundred plaster casts of limestone containing fossils—understood as geological imprints and natural records of time. Treated as the landscape’s own forms of inscription, these casts function as indices of duration, erosion, and sedimentation, foregrounding the archive as a material process rather than a human-authored document. Alongside these objects, moving images filmed underwater and subsequently subjected to analogue manipulation further destabilise the image as a transparent record, emphasising distortion, refraction, and temporal displacement.

Field recordings collected at the site are processed and transformed, extending the project’s archival logic into the sonic domain. Sound operates not as ambient accompaniment, but as a mutable material shaped through repetition, degradation, and mediation, paralleling the visual and sculptural elements of the work.

Rather than representing a specific location, the project treats place as an active and contingent system—one in which memory, matter, and perception intersect across different temporal scales. Through the interplay of image, object, sound, and moving image, the work examines how landscapes persist, transform, and exceed human presence, situating individual memory within broader processes of geological, material, and technological time.