Artist: Daimen Stephens
Mediums: Digital prints from wet plate collodion ambrotypes and ferrotypes
Dimension: 91cm x 87cm x 1cm
Artist Statement:
This work is grounded in the sand dunes and scrublands surrounding Numbulwar, where the landscape acts as an active participant in the inscription of memory; an unstable archive co-authoring cycles of burial, exposure, and return.
I photograph long discarded clothing, old polaroids and fragments of fabric recovered from the dunes in the hope that they might function as monuments to ephemera; fugitive artifacts of human occupation that have entered the material ecology of the landscape where they are held and eroded until they eventually re-emerge staging a hauntological persistence that is neither fully present nor fully absent.
In the wet plate collodion process, the image operates as a kind of interface between light and chemistry – between the elemental and the fabricated. The dunes exist in a similar register: a shifting threshold between the physical and the metaphysical, where matter is continuously negotiated by atmospheric, temporal, and gravitational intensities. Each plate renders the material artefacts of both time and vulnerability; dust, heat, chemical interaction, and abrasion where landscape, object, and process converge to stage memory not as a fixed record, but as an ongoing condition — shifting, surfacing, haunted and resisting resolution.
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