Traces of What Fades, Echoes of What Remains

Traces is a series of paintings that extends my ongoing research into memory and forgetting. While connected to the broader Memory and Forgetfulness project, this series focuses more intimately on childhood impressions and the way gestures dissolve into fragmented recollections.

The works combine cyanotype and egg tempera with a sustainable, material-driven approach, but with a lighter and more immediate touch. Instead of building heavy layers, these paintings prioritise the raw moment of the gesture. Each mark appears and disappears quickly, mirroring how personal memories fade into a larger universe of words, traces, and partially erased thoughts.

Influenced by philosophical reflections on presence, loss, and the impermanence of experience, the compositions move between visibility and disappearance. Handwritten fragments drift across the surface like forgotten lines, while a small white shape or a single orange line remains as the final residue of gestures that once felt powerful and permanent. What stays is minimal, almost ghostly — the surviving trace of what the body, the emotion, or the moment used to be.

In Traces, the body becomes an imprint fading into the surface. Memory collapses into material. What persists is what cannot be completely erased.

This series speaks to collectors interested in gesture, process, and the poetics of disappearance. Each work holds a balance between presence and loss, offering a visual record of the marks we leave behind and the ones that slip away.