I’ve always been a slow processor. I tend to realise things way after the fact. A bit of a space cadet, perhaps. Something happens, I wander off, and then sometime later I find myself going, ohhh… so that’s what that was about.

Maybe that’s why returning feels so familiar to me.

Sometime in the middle to the end of last year, I began a body of work called Structures of Remembering. Some of the early work was shown as part of the group exhibition Traces: drawings, sketches and a fragile sculptural form, all circling around the image of a chair.

At the time, I wrote:

These works are traces of a process still unfolding—early thoughts, fragments, and impressions that hold the beginnings of a larger body of work.

I wasn’t entirely sure what that larger body of work was yet.

I knew there was something about the chair that I wanted to stay with. Its relationship to the body interested me. A chair is made in relation to a body. It holds its weight, offers support, invites presence, and when left empty can somehow make an absent body more visible. I was thinking about presence and absence, vulnerability, gathering, witnessing, healing and isolation. But mostly, I was circling. Making. Looking. Trying things out.

And then life happened.

I put Structures of Remembering on the back burner. Or perhaps I just forgot that there isn’t always such a clear distinction between art and life.

I didn’t abandon it completely. I returned occasionally. Made something. Drew something. Picked at an idea. Left again. Some things were allowed to grow quietly in the background.

Now, as I begin my MA, I’m digging some of those things up again.

The idea that something can become known through making before I can articulate it through language isn’t entirely new to me. I’ve encountered it through other projects: making first, understanding later. What I hadn’t necessarily considered was whether the things I make might also be traces of that process—material remnants of trying to know, remember, or process something.

Or perhaps I had considered it.

I’m trying to remember.

There is something quite fitting about not being sure.

Looking back at what I wrote for Traces, I was already describing these works as “traces of a process still unfolding”. But I think, at the time, I understood that largely as the unfolding of a body of work: early thoughts, experiments and fragments that might eventually become something else.

Now I’m wondering whether the process they trace is something less straightforward.

Perhaps the making itself records a process of coming to know.

I can see questions emerging that I couldn’t fully articulate at the time. The chair was there. The body was there, even in its absence. Ideas around support, vulnerability, presence, absence and what remains were there. I just didn’t know yet what they were becoming.

Of course, I’m still not entirely sure.

This isn’t to suggest that the work secretly contained an answer that I hadn’t figured out yet. That feels far too neat. Maybe making simply gave me somewhere to put things while I was still trying to understand them.

I’m curious about what might happen if I approach the chair more deliberately from here. Not necessarily as a symbol with a fixed meaning, but as an object to think through—a structure I can return to, repeat, alter, dismantle and remake.

If making can be a process of coming to know, what is left behind by that process? Could the things I make be understood as remnants of an encounter with something I couldn’t necessarily articulate beforehand? And if some of that knowing happens through the body, could what remains become a material record of what the body knows?

I don’t know what that record would look like, or whether record is even the right word. Perhaps that’s something I want to test.

Perhaps the chair gives me a structure through which to test this. It already carries a relationship to the body—holding it, supporting it, bearing its weight, registering its presence and making its absence visible. I want to see what happens when I keep returning to it through different materials, processes and repetitions.

I don’t know what I’ll find yet. That’s the beauty of not knowing, I guess.

Perhaps that’s why repetition and return keep finding their way into my work. I make something, leave it, encounter it again, and find that something has shifted. Sometimes the thing has changed. Sometimes I have. Usually, I suspect, it’s both.

Something happened.
Something remains.
Something returns.
But never quite the same.

Perhaps putting Structures of Remembering aside wasn’t an interruption to the work at all. There was simply an interval.

And life happened in it.

Bodies continued. Relationships shifted. Things were lost, repeated, remembered and forgotten. Life kept accumulating. I just wasn’t calling it art.

Maybe I’m not picking the project back up.

Maybe I’m encountering it again.

And this time, I’m looking at what remains.