Research Statement

Traces begins with a question:

After human thoughts and actions have taken place, might something of them continue to remain within a space?

I chose temples and churches as sites for the work not to address any particular religion or system of belief, but because long-standing practices of faith often bring people into a heightened state of attention. Wishes, prayers, fears, and hopes gather around a single intention, repeatedly entering the same space through different people and across different moments in time. These places therefore become sites of accumulated human attention and presence.

The work uses spatial scanning as an image-making process. Unlike photography, which records an exposure within a moment, scanning reads space progressively through time. The X and Y axes describe horizontal and vertical positions, while the T axis records the duration of the scan. When these dimensions intersect and shift in relation to one another, the familiar stability of space begins to break down: time becomes a visible dimension, while space itself begins to flow.

The scanning process compresses the T axis into a single still image. When a living body moves during this process, its form is stretched, fragmented, and recomposed, producing figures that are no longer immediately recognisable. These unfamiliar forms are neither technical errors nor representations of physical appearance. They are visual traces produced through an encounter between life and time.

Horizontal bands, fractured lines, and residual forms transform architecture from a fixed container into a space constructed through time, human action, and concentrated intention.

How is our existence rewritten by time?

And in what form does it remain within space?