This series responds to a collection of belongings forgotten in storage for 50 years, which came into my possession by chance. Everyday items (mementos, clothes, and a lifetime of photographs), they are a modest residue of a long dead stranger’s identity.

I ask the lost objects to show this stranger to me. Reflections of photographs cast onto artefacts reveal glimpses of filtered, distorted, duplicated non-spaces. Tiny out of focus snapshots, viewed with a digital microscope, allude to an elusive form that dissolves with my looking. I find her but cannot really see her.

Transformed into larger paintings and drawings, meaning transmutes again. Visualised in two dimensional materiality as both real and abstract, a presence caught in liminal time and space emerges. The stranger’s identity is displaced, fugitive and indeterminate.

The work invites a visual conversation about the mystery of what is left after memories and identity are lost through death and forgetting, of our mutual unknowableness, and of the material mediations of perception.

Titles of works in this series are derived from texts discovered in the stranger's collection. These texts were found either in the stranger's handwriting as notes or on the backs of photographs, or in literature or correspondence. I have chosen texts that refer to identity, relationships, memory or time. I do this ironically, to set up a tension between the sentiment of the text and the loss of its meaning as expressed visually in the imagery.

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