The Shape of What Remains

Grief and loss do not simply pass through us; they settle, reshape, and become part of what we are. Through personal encounters with loss and my work as a hospice nurse, I have experienced how grief often creates an abstract and intangible space, marked by an absence of time, words, and meaning. A space that can be difficult to enter - and if we don’t, it may form an almost impermeable wall between us. 

I explore the boundary between inner and outer worlds through the encounter of clay and a membrane-like biofilm, cultivated via the fermentation of bacteria and yeast. I investigate how the biofilm’s changing translucency, thickness, color, and softness interact with different high-fired clay bodies, whose movements shift between reaching outward towards the world and folding inward towards the self.

The Shape of What Remains explores an ongoing exchange between clay and a living biofilm cultivated through the fermentation of bacteria and yeast. Their encounter becomes an expression of transformation and a site of mutual shaping – a slow choreography of change and unification. When the wet biofilm dries, it takes form and imprint from the clay, and over time, it becomes one with the clay body.