The Ephemeral Trace project is an expression of movement from digital to analogue. In it lies a great privilege of holding a tangible piece of evidence that is a representation of impermanent artefacts.
Original cyanotype prints documenting the interaction between the physical world and dimensionless forms. Each work is a limited edition set of 10, developed by hand on 300gsm cotton watercolour paper.
The ability to hold something fleeting in your hands is incredibly rare. An impermanent structure has no physical form of its own, so without intervention, memory is all that holds it.
Impermanent structures can be classified as the evidence of multidimensional spaces. Matter is static, however the interaction that occurs between multidimensional elements and matter, results in impermanent structures. Time creates a window of opportunity to view that impermanence but not store it as a static object like matter. The beauty of this project is that light itself, being an impermanent structure, is the catalyst for materialising the impermanence into a tangible form. The cyanotype process acts as the conduit that allows the transformation from multidimensional artefact into tangible form, captured in a static material; its structure is revealed within the image.
The idea is simple enough: do we understand reality from a physical aspect alone, or can we entertain the idea that the things we cannot perceive physically have just as much influence in shaping our reality? If we lean into the metaphysical aspect, we can understand that digital creations are part of the same principles as the impermanent structures around us, and to be able to transform a digital object into tangible matter is the alchemy required to understand the parts of our reality that are made up of non-physical forces.
