I cast objects in sticky wet tissue paper and when the paper dries, what I peel off carries the form and marks of the original, only it is colourless and weightless. This technique enables me to capture, almost literally in the sense of “stealing”, all the details, even the most minute ones, of the original object without damaging it. I sometimes cover the surface of my tissue paper casts with pencil strokes, creating a three-dimensional drawing, as if I had sculpted the paper with the mark making.

My work deals with the ideas of liminality, of impermanence, of presence/absence. It questions the nature of things, of what is reality or perceived as such. 

My sculptures are like a trace, a vaporous evocation of the original. Pale and sometimes incomplete or opened up, they are like silent citation marks that reiterate the objects around us. They make reference to real objects and places that exist somewhere else or have existed in a different time. They could either be an apparition or in the process of vanishing, like a lasting impression, a fading memory or a lingering smell.

My tissue paper sculptures strive to achieve the impossible, to inhabit the space between spaces, the threshold between inside and outside, presence and absence, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, reality and memory, reality and dream. I’ve been strongly inspired by the notion of the ‘infra thin’, a strange and poetic concept invented and developed by Marcel Duchamp. Impossible to define, infra thin is a kind of immeasurable difference or separation between two seemingly identical things. According to Duchamp, this partition is virtually imperceptible, but absolute. Examples of the infra thin include an object at one time and then one second later, the warmth of a seat that has just been left, or the space between recto and verso…

As I materialise the tiny interstice that lies between the object and the negative space around it, I like to believe that I materialise Marcel Duchamp’s infra thin.

Having originally started to use photography to document my sculptural work, I soon decided that the photograph can also be very interesting per se as the final piece of work. In this instance, I destroy the sculptures and the photograph is what is left of my creative process. My tissue paper casts being like the traces of the original objects, I like the idea that the photograph, one step further removed from the object, is like the ‘trace of the trace’. Through my casting process, ordinary and overlooked objects are elevated to the level of precious artefacts, weightless and colourless, as if haunting the space of the real. The realness of things is further challenged through the use of photography. We are left uncertain as to the true nature of the final images, just as we are uncertain as to the true nature of reality.