PROJECT ROOM
MATERIAL REMAINS
CLARE HUMPHRIES
Most of us live with the traces of the dead – the personal belongings left behind when someone dies. David Malouf once wrote that inter-generational objects gather the fingerprints of their users, allowing us to somehow keep contact with lost loved ones. His literary image suggests that belongings are transformed through physical contact, that their very substance is changed by and charged with the body. Through the print-based works in Material remains I explore the significance of inherited possessions. In the making I have drawn on ideas of surface wear and bodily contact, and subjected the works to a passage of burial and exhumation through layers of ink. In this way I have sought to engage with personal objects as both subject matter, and as a metaphor to shape the making process.
