Project Overview
Grief predates language. Long before there were words adequate to loss, there were objects: things pressed into hands, worn against skin, kept in pockets and on shelves and in the dark. The impulse to make something in the presence of death is not sentiment and it is not decoration. It is the body’s attempt to give weight to what cannot be said, to locate in matter what the mind keeps losing and the hands keep reaching for.
Undulating Husk begins there, with that oldest and most stubborn of human instincts, and refuses the sanitised version of it. These are not memorial objects in any conventional sense. They do not commemorate or console. They hold the part of grief that never becomes narrative: the reflex reach, the muscle memory that outlives its object, the accumulated pressure of what could not settle and so built itself, layer by layer, into something that can at least be carried.
Undulating Husk : Memory Vessels
Material: Resin electroformed with copper and mica-based patina
Technique: Forms built with cotton wool-mâché, air-drying clay, lacquer wax, embedded beads and wire; completed through mould-making in resin for stronger form, electroformed and hand painted
Size: Various (approx. 4–6.5 cm high × 9–10 cm wide)
Description: Twisted forms caught mid-shift. These vessels are held rather than worn, shaped by the logic of grief before it becomes language. Their electroformed skin thickens into nodules, hollows, bruising, and sealed-over breaches, so the object reads less as adornment than as memory stabilised into matter. They sit beside Third Person Memory Collapse, where recall slips pronoun, habit outlives the body, and what remains is not recovery but residue. These are not neat memorials. They are vessels for what stayed: touch, routine, shock, and the afterlife of holding.
Reflex Grief: Cradled Residue
It doesn’t sit still in the body. The hand curves around it instinctively, not to fix it in place but to carry it, like grief turning into habit. You do not wear this piece, you cradle it. Its coppered surface makes memory feel held rather than resolved: residue given weight, shape, and a body to move around.
Pressure Archive: Nodule Field
Three close readings of the same skin where copper rises through bruised purples, greens, and sealed-over swelling. The nodules feel less decorative than accumulated, as though touch, shock, and repetition have thickened into a surface that cannot smooth itself back out.
Memory Trace: what returns first is texture, not narrative
Surface Event: Close to Breach
The surface behaves like pressure skin. Nodules cluster, swell, and split, while copper forces through bruised purples and moulded greens. Nothing here feels balanced or decorative. This is memory at the point of rupture: creeping, uneven, and nearly breaking through the vessel that tries to contain it.
Sediment Skin: Aftertouch
A lower, denser surface where nodules pack together into something almost epidermal. Nothing opens cleanly here. The vessel seems to seal over and build up instead, each layer keeping the pressure of what could not settle.
Memory Trace: what cannot be released settles into handling.
Breach Ridge: Bruise Bloom
A curved edge at the point where the vessel appears to strain against its own containment. Copper swells through blue-violet bruising, making the surface read like memory pressing outward, held for a moment before split or release.
Memory Trace: recall gathers where the form is weakest
Written Project Companion
Third Person Memory Collapse is a forthcoming text on grief, memory, and dislocated identity. It sits beside these forms as their verbal equivalent: unstable, fossil-like, and quietly deformed by recall. Memory does not return cleanly here. It shifts pronouns, alters sequence, corrects itself mid-sentence, and turns the speaking self into someone half-recognised. This is not healing. It is memory under pressure, stabilised just enough to take form.
Excerpt: ‘Your name doesn’t fit. Muscle memory becomes narrative. You speak with her cadence…’
Source Companion
A second companion text sits closer to the originating loss behind these vessels. Where Third Person Memory Collapse tracks the distortion of memory, this text stays nearer the event itself: the body, the aftermath, the carried routine, and the moment grief first entered form. It is less about recollection than rupture.