TRACES - Fall 2025

a capsule of 5 pieces on the residue of experience

Nov 06, 2025

Traces is a fall capsule of five process-driven works made with salt flakes and natural pigment powders on raw canvas. It begins with the question — what remains after experience moves through us?

The catalyst for this body of work was a 10-day visit from my younger sister back in September. She’s the person who knows me best in this world, and her presence became a container for us to revisit old memories. We noticed how differently those memories felt now, as though time had quietly distorted the way they lived inside us. I began to reflect on how, more than experience itself, we’re shaped by its residue — how our recollections keep re-forming around who we become. That became the root of Traces: an exploration of what remains after a moment fades, how it erodes and shifts, and how the act of trying to preserve something inevitably alters it.

Each work translates that process of erosion into material form. I begin by drawing with salt on raw canvas — simple, instinctive shapes that hold the feeling of a memory more than its exact details. Diluted pigment is then washed across the surface and left to cure. As it dries, the salt absorbs moisture and resists the pigment, preventing it from fully settling into the weave of the canvas. When the salt is brushed away, what remains is a pixelated imprint — patches of raw canvas beside expanses of a thin mineral residue. The image exists in the spaces the salt protected; the distorted surface is a record of the process itself.

It took several weeks of testing to dial this process — how much water to dilute the pigment powders with, how long to let the salt cure before brushing it away. If I touched it too soon, the water would bleed and ruin the imprint, but if I waited too long, the salt flakes would recrystallize onto the canvas and ruin the weave.

Salt felt like the perfect conduit for this exploration. It preserves, but it also corrodes. That tension runs through Traces: every act of remembrance is also an act of revision. Here, the canvas carries the history of its making — a record of time, erosion, and change. The five works — Slow Drift, Canyon Veins, Inner Monologue, Parallel Lives, and Saltwater Souvenir — flicker like signals through static. Forms emerge through absence, where negative space becomes its own form of presence. They can only tell you that something was here — not what it was, not how it felt, only that it passed through.

This body of work began as an inquiry I wanted to push further, though I didn’t know where it would lead. As an artist still early in my practice, it felt important to trust that pull — to step outside my usual way of working and see what might surface. That risk feels vital to what the work itself is about.

Ultimately, Traces reflects on what remains. It sees record and residue not as something fixed, but as something alive — a surface that remembers, forgets, and distorts itself with time. Nothing stays intact, but everything leaves a trace.

— Available Works —

Each piece is signed, sealed, UV-protected, and comes in a maple floating frame ready to hang: