I Dreamt of Lost Vocabularies III builds upon research initiated during my residency with the 20/20 Project at National Museums Northern Ireland, extending an ongoing exploration of family archives and diasporic memory. Drawing from photographs and inherited narratives spanning India, East Africa and the UK, this chapter moves further into the space between record and remembrance.
Returning to images accumulated across generations, the works consider the archive not as a fixed repository but as a site of continual negotiation, where omissions and repetition create new possibilities for meaning. Through collage, fragments are reconfigured and brought into dialogue, allowing histories to remain open and in motion.
Rather than seeking resolution, I Dreamt of Lost Vocabularies III reflects on how memory is translated across time and generations. The works become propositions for encountering absence differently, holding space for what cannot be fully recovered while imagining new relationships to inherited histories.
Mixed media: archival family photographs, gouache, 24-karat gold, ink, archival pen, 19th-century postcard on pigment print and ultraviolet silhouette portrait on glass; 38.5 x 48.5 x 4 cm
NO PICTURES TO DREAM OF
THE REST HAS ALL BEEN DREAMS.
WE DREAM TO TRAVEL BEYOND ALL DOUBTS – BEYOND EVERYTHING
EYES BLOOM AS SHADOWS BLEED.
ALL WE IMAGINE IS LIGHT
THE SPACE BETWEEN UNSPOKEN WORDS
THERE IS SOMETHING I SEE. I MUST TELL YOU.
I DID NOT COME HERE BY CHANCE
I CAN ONLY SEE, WHAT YOU'VE SHOWN ME
