Lou Palmer

My work explores how absence features as a constant in our everyday lives and the role of making in our preservation of fleeting things. Through making and exhibiting, I aim to create a pause, making space to sit with and give strength to the complex emotional experiences that arise in response to non-finite loss (loss that is ongoing). This feels particularly important in a time that seems to be characterised by rapid change, disappearance and destruction, both on a global scale – with extreme environmental disaster and conflict – and in our personal lives.

Taking inspiration from artists and writers who situate the human experience within the broad web of life that co-exists on the earth – such as Katie Paterson, Ilana Halperin, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Donna Haraway – my research revolves around ideas of kinship and how making can be used to evidence our care for one another in a way that resists the passage of time. As such, I view my practice as a form of alternative memorial making and, almost, an act of defiance. Photography, archives (both personal and institutional) and even our built and geological environments are artifacts of frozen time, imbued with the stories and feelings from whence they came. These may appear to us as fragments that we can connect to and make connections between through collecting. Drawing and making using slow, analogue methods becomes a way to prolong these solidified moments – reconstructing them, getting to know them better and holding onto them, even after they are long gone.

My work draws together several material influences: the languages of bookbinding, printmaking, painting and stone memorial are all intermittently present within the work, informing the colour palette, composition and content of the pieces. I use negative space and translucency to construct images of the human figure and ambiguous biomorphic patterns, making a perception of impermanence into something cathartically tangible.