Trace Fossil

Trace Fossil evokes the act of digging – into earth, memory, and trauma. Preserving the gesture of searching hands, its form and materials recall Pompeian casts, negative spaces left by vanished bodies.
Trace Fossil was made for an exposition at T-Space, a gallery where a former proprietor, in a state of psychosis, once tore up floor tiles in pursuit of imagined gold. Elevated as a reliquary, the work considers and accepts how human remains are distorted and perverted to become the foundations of place and myth. Trace Fossil acknowledges excavation as a uniquely human way to process lived experience, enshrining the apocryphal stories we tell to make sense of history.

Photography © Tomas Bachot