Porcelain, clothing, ash

Installation view

Held As Trace examines uncertainty as a material and relational condition, using precarity as its primary methodology. Clothing belonging to friends and family recently deceased become a transient armature, a set of intimate yet expendable matrices through which porcelain is formed and then absented. What persists are the contours and voids: a hollowed residue of contact and wear, where the garment once mediated between body and environment.

Precarity is articulated through the work’s structural fragility, its provisional mode of presentation, and the terms on which it engages the viewer. The porcelain remnants are not individually staged or stabilised; they are accumulated in a low heap on the floor. Their thinness, porosity, and susceptibility to fracture render them perpetually at risk of collapse, abrasion, and reconfiguration. The assemblage remains contingent, never fully resolved, never safely complete, existing as a state rather than a stable form.

Within this field, uncertainty is the very mode through which relation and loss are understood. The heap of hollow shells operates as an indeterminate topology of grief, each volume indexes an exact garment and body; opaque, in that those referents never fully disclose themselves. Held in suspension between trace and erasure, presence and withdrawal, intimacy and anonymity. The work proposes precarity as a critical framework: by insisting on fragility, incompleteness, and the possibility of further rupture, it figures grief and material both as evolving, susceptible states, sustained only through what persists as trace.