22/07/2026
Against Forgetting
What does it mean to be against forgetting?
For me, it isn’t about preserving a place exactly as it once was. Change is inevitable. Landscapes evolve, buildings disappear, communities grow, and memories fade. Instead, Against Forgetting asks what deserves to remain and how photography can and does become part of that process.
Memory rarely exists as a single image. It is built from fragments- places we’ve visited, photographs we’ve kept, maps we’ve followed, tickets we’ve saved and stories we’ve inherited. The pinboard became an important part of Against Forgetting because it reflects this process of collecting and connecting. It is both an archive and a working space: somewhere memories are preserved, revisited and continually reassembled rather than sealed away behind glass.
• The board = the archive.
• The magnets = memory is not fixed.
• The photographs = contemporary witnessing.
• The postcards and maps = inherited memory.
• The empty spaces = what has already been lost or can never be fully recovered.
The work combines my original analogue photographs with vintage postcards, historic maps and collected ephemera. Each material carries its own history, but together they create new conversations between past and present. Rather than simply documenting a location, the work physically embeds fragments of place within it, recognising that memory is rarely contained in a single photograph. It exists across objects, landscapes, archives and the stories we continue to tell.
To be against forgetting is not to resist change, but to acknowledge that places are made meaningful through the traces they leave behind. Photography becomes more than a record; it becomes an act of remembering.
I am delighted that Against Forgetting is part of the Scott Creative Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award 2026 and will be exhibited at Danum Gallery, Library and Museum.
Scott Creative Arts Foundation
Danum Gallery Library Museum
