Seasons is a memory work encompassing writing, photography, sound and installation. It examines memory and displacement, moving from individual experience to communal history, from private investigation to political enquiry. It is a work in progress and will ultimately have three parts – the first, Never Still, has been completed and exhibited, the second, For Now, This is Our House, is currently in development. The third is yet to take shape.
The project was initiated by my father’s death and his ‘send-off’, a Buddhist fire ceremony at his home in Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen. He settled in this communal ‘social experiment’ in the early 1970s, leaving Britain and never returning. I was adopted as a child and met him, Stace, only as an adult, after an exhaustive search. That discovery, and its limits, is where the work begins.
This is an evolving investigation that combines creative research, experiential encounter and critical interpretation. A defining discovery was a newspaper photograph of Stace as a teenage hippy, illustrating ‘The Disturbing World of the Flower Children’, published in the British Sunday newspaper the News of the World in 1967. It was the first image I ever saw of him.
Benjamin’s matter-of-fact advice, that ‘he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging’, and must ‘return again and again to the same matter’, deeply resonated – it gave me licence, which helped shape my approach. Memory here is understood not as a stable archive but as a living, mutable process: personal and communal, unknown and experienced, always unfinished.
The project pursues interconnected questions. How can an unknown past be accounted for, and how does a personal narrative shape the very memories it addresses? How can memory’s process be realised and shared creatively, contributing to the ongoing making of memory? The work pushes against the bias of the dominant record and archive, placing personal narrative alongside recovered testimony and archival research to produce an individual and critical counter-narrative.
Never Still (2025)
This work comprises a series of seven LED lightboxes and an artist’s pamphlet. It was shown at Contact, a two-part exhibition at New Art Projects, London, which I also curated – ‘All the work demands imaginative thinking on the part of the viewer to extend and complete it, prompting a reflection on what “moving” might mean.’ (Millennium Film Journal, 2025)
The free-standing, individually sized lightboxes appeared in the second part on the exhibition. They represent personal archival images and address how identities are bound to one another, as well as to place and time – ‘Vallance’s boxes turn flat things into mysterious objects.’ (Nicky Hamlyn, Contact I & II, 2025)
Each lightbox displays a pair of images derived from familial photographs gathered during my search, mirroring the adoptee’s experience of being named twice. Printed in black and white and inverted, a treatment that alters the value and historical cast of archival material, the pairings produce new, unintended connections, enacting memory’s associative and reconstructive nature.
Here memory is not an instrument but a medium, and the work seeks to activate the archive as a dynamic rather than settled entity. As Sontag suggests, memory resembles a photograph more than a strip of film: a partial, constructed image rather than a continuous record.
The pamphlet and its accompanying postcard offer different material forms and registers, creating a dispersed and durational encounter. The pamphlet contains an episodic text that unfolds like a map, weaving together autobiographical narrative, archival fragments and critical reflection. The postcard is based on one Stace sent when he left home at seventeen. Together they allude to other times and modes of communication, extending the work’s temporal and material registers. Designed to be read in situ or taken away, it carries the work’s act of remembering into other contexts and encounters.
For Now, This is Our House
This work asks who gets to be remembered, and on whose terms. Its form will be a spatialised soundscape combined with floor-based moving-image sequences, making the work more embodied and more physically expansive. It will be accompanied by a second text, following a similar configuration to the first.
Where Never Still addressed the search visually, by recontextualising archival photographs, this project explores how my work can become more directly sensory through spatial sound. As part of this endeavour, I will travel to Christiania again to undertake an extensive programme of field recordings, including listening to Stace’s remaining peers.
This will expand my practice into the sonic realm, locating presence, past and present, in a specific place. Having developed the spatial and sonic concept, I now need to place myself in the landscape, listening and recording. The auditory and visual elements will complement and compound one another, becoming perceptual, haptic and durational. In making the work viscerally felt, the project challenges visual dominance and archival bias, which are never neutral, carry personal significance and can be contested; a position that is vital and timely.
The accompanying text combines autobiographical and critical reflection with historical context, alongside a transcript of a conversation with Stace’s old friend and neighbour Thomas – it was recorded in 2008 when I was in Christiania for Stace’s sixtieth birthday – whose testimony adds specificity and counter-history.
In conversation, I have found that Christiania always elicits intrigue. Its founding principles of shared property rights, cooperative governance and communal inclusivity inspire and confuse in equal measure. Those who have visited often find the reality disappointing, too unrefined, its residents unwelcoming – without my connection, that may well have been my impression too. One such exchange prompted me to revisit Thomas’s words – they are like a message in a bottle, proof of a distant, unknown place, a society in the process of forming, for Freetown was an act of imagination that dared to create its own truth.
