I am a visual artist and writer interested in places, spaces and buildings and have spent many years trying to better understanding how architecture and the built environment affect our behaviour, influencing how we live, work, think and feel. In cities, I am alive to the presence of buildings and their unique atmospheres. Working through narrative, image and sound, I try to convey a “sense of place.”

My research has explored place as the locus of memory. Some places live long in the memory after we leave them. Some memories, in their intensity, return us instantly to certain times in certain places. After many years of investigation and study, it is clear to me that some places more than others are suffused with “emotional residue.”

This project is a visual exploration of “Thin Places” within the medium of print. In writing on Celtic lore, “thin places” have been variously described as those rare locales “where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous”; “where the distance between earth and heaven collapses” or “places in the world where the walls grow weak.”

In response to a tragedy, the magnitude of which will resonate widely, I will investigate how certain places are charged with absence and loss and how memory can be a form of wayfinding through which such places or buildings can be mapped. The narrative will also explore how returning to those places can return our memories to us. A pilgrimage of sorts.

The medium of print is as much a part of the proposed work as its subject matter because the processes and materials involved are intrinsically volatile, mirroring the fugitive and precarious nature of memory. The project will test whether the concept of loss, absence and fading memory can be adequately conveyed through ink on paper.