Abandoned Archive is as much about discovery as it is about preservation, but it also acknowledges my somewhat painful relationship and revelation with self, where preservation of ‘The Archive’ is less about freezing or protecting material in time, and more about a reckoning, a discovery and an act of self-repair.

Finding elements of self in the material, without being fully conscious of them at the time, points away from intention and to a subconscious map of my struggles and preoccupations that only become legible in the aftermath.

With that notion in mind, Abandoned Archive questions how an original material’s meaning can evolve and shape future expression and garner emotional responses, whilst simultaneously challenging the precision of photography with a brutally abstract body of work, which was highly demanding and rare in the making.

Abandoned Archive does that with an experimental work that no longer connects to reality at all, but just to what once existed, where photography began not as the endpoint but as a tool, a graphic surface for a complex, empirical darkroom and studio process which made visible the unintended consequences of trying to bring order to self, and to deal with the present.

Of remembrance itself, it is neither passive nor static. It distorts, erodes, and reconstructs in the very act of recalling. Similarly, Abandoned Archive asserts that materials are not merely carriers of an object once photographed, but are active participants in the formation of perception and emotion. The project rejects the immediacy of memory as a faithful record, instead interrogating how knowledge, evidence, and interpretation emerge from matter.

Rather than passively observing, I urge the audience to bypass the visual immediacy of gallery viewing and to instead generate a wider impression and empathy through deeper analysis of gestural marks, thus contributing a new way of reading photographic material that transcends the traditional view of photography and marks a shift from aesthetic interpretation to material interpretation.

The work — being an evolving dialogue between self, material and viewer — challenges the contemporary emphasis of image or concept, proposing instead that the physical matter of an artwork—time and the rudimentary medium of photographic film — becomes the intrinsic value.

The viewer is invited to shift focus from the traditional conceptual framework toward an engagement with 'matter’ and ‘being’ itself. In this way, Abandoned Archive becomes a trans- disciplinary exploration where music and spoken word converge to unison and disrupt conventional ideas of image and engagement.

Articulated through the historic archive itself, and to be further explored through a new score of music, live spoken-word and performance, and several photographic and lithographic prints, viewers are nudged towards an empathetic engagement through the very act of attentive looking, listening and reading.

Furthermore, by not approaching these works as photographs, concepts, or even memories, one steps closer towards the material evidence that encapsulates and makes tangible my history of at times crushing dysfunction.

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