Here and gone
photographic prints made at Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 2017Here and Gone was a series of photographic prints made at Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Natural materials such poppy heads, pine cones and seed pods were gathered from the surrounding environment, cast in white wax, and then returned to the landscape from which they were taken.
Once placed back, they appear both present and displaced. The wax form sits within the environment but does not fully belong to it, holding the shape of something organic while remaining visibly altered. In the photographs, they seem cut out from their surroundings, a negative shape, as if hovering between insertion and removal, between being there and not.
The process moves through stages of collecting, casting and returning, though what is returned is no longer the same. The work lingers in this slight disjunction: between original and replica, between what is found and what is remade and what cannot be replicated.
There is a sense of trying to re-place something, to bring it back into relation with where it came from, while also encountering the impossibility of that return. The wax objects hold a kind of stillness that contrasts with the environment around them, where change and decay continues regardless of their material permanance. Remaining with the tension between presence and absence, the work asks what it means for something to be returned, and whether it can ever fully arrive back where it once was.
