What remains when we disappear from living memory? When all that's left are traces and fragments of our existence, what was our purpose, and what compels us to explore the voids others leave behind?
These questions arise as I piece together the life of my great aunt Dr. Annie Deane, who passed away before I was born, a relationship defined by absence. Annie was a pioneering spirit and a constant in the community, tending to their medical needs for over thirty years. Yet she left surprisingly few footprints. Rather than attempting to fill the gaps in Annie's story, All that is solid… finds comfort in the unknown, recognising that the spaces she left behind are as essential to understanding her as any tangible trace.
Through found and generated images, I look for the essence of Annie, inhabiting the liminal spaces where memory meets imagination, and presence meets absence. Through AI collaboration, the fragments become starting points for new kinds of traces, visual speculations that live in the space between what we know and what we imagine. Here, the incompleteness of her history becomes not a problem to be solved, but a generative space where absences collaborate in creating meaning - the hole in the doughnut that makes the doughnut whole.
All that is solid… reveals how everything exists in constant transformation, where boundaries between past and present, memory and imagination, life and death, become fluid and permeable - a space where the holes and the whole exist in constant dialogue.
All that is solid... is part of The Doughnut (W)hole Pavilion at The Wrong Biennale (7th Edition) 2025/26 opening 1st November 2025.
This work has been supported by Galway County Council's Artist Support Scheme and will be part of The Doughnut (W)hole Pavilion at The Wrong Biennale 2025/26.
