Fragments Preserved #1

WHD: 30cm x 30cm x 23cm

Material: Salt and magnetic tape on brisk fired paper clay, acrylic, steel wool, rust.

Year: 2026

Exhibition: Wanneroo Community Art Awards 2026

A personal memory recorded onto tape and preserved within a fragment of a salt-lake.

Salt-lakes react to foreign objects through a duality of death and everlasting life. Poetically, the lake will either accept the object through crystallisation or reject it through rusting it away until its environment is cleansed. This sculpture takes an audio recording of one of the artist’s most personal memories on cassette tape, and embeds it into a hyper-realistic fragment of a salt-lake. A salt-lake holds one of the oldest organisms on earth (Cyanobacteria) within their microbial mats, lasting for thousands of years. They become a permanent body to the landscape and preserve geological deep time history. This work was inspired by the artist’s struggle with ADHD and remembering, and the urge to want an external brain to remember her most precious echoes. They are preserved within the fragment of the lake, in hope that they will be poetically remembered by the lake for longer than the artist will be alive. The work details a close-up view of the harshness, beauty and the alien nature of the salt-lake, aesthetically based on the ones the artist saw on her trip to Rottnest Island.

Tape became the ideal medium for storing memories as it stores sound invisibly, like how thoughts stay secret. In a world of constant surveillance, memories remain one of the last private depictions of ‘the self’. The process of building the lake, then embedding and crystalizing memories to preserve them, is a ritual that materialises the concept of memory.

As proof of authenticity the artist has a video of her recording each memory within this series, given to the buyer.