Guests from the Past emerged from the rediscovery of a small watercolour painting I had created as a child. Encountering the work years later reminded me of the freedom with which ideas once appeared and the instinctive way creativity flowed before it became entangled with expectation or understanding. Life felt simpler then, yet also more uncertain. The painting depicted three figures seemingly dissolving into the distance, shedding their colour one drop at a time as if candle at a dinner table late at night. Looking back at the image, I was struck by a sense of loss and detachment—the feeling of childhood companions gradually drifting away from one’s path through life. It became a reflection on impermanence, memory, and the limited time we share with one another.

 

A recurring thought accompanied the development of the work: as a candle burns, so too does time; and one day every memory may evaporate as the flame finally goes out.

 

In response, I chose to explore an unfamiliar medium in much the same spirit that had led me to watercolour as a child. Entering the ceramics studio for the first time, I gave myself permission to learn through intuition rather than technical understanding. My intention was not to master the material academically, but to discover it through touch, curiosity, and play. The original painting remained hidden throughout the process so that I could work entirely from memory. What emerged were figures that seemed to exist somewhere between recollection and invention.

 

Alongside the sculptures, I produced drawings of related beings with impossible anatomies and ambiguous bodily structures. Oscillating between the familiar and the otherworldly, these forms consistently retained traces of humanity, most often through the face. Even when their bodies appeared alien, fragmented, or transformed, a human presence remained. Much like memory itself, certain details had disappeared while others survived, held together by imagination rather than certainty.

 

The ceramic figures stand on elongated stilt-like legs, enabling them to traverse forgotten places and fractured recollections. They wear masks that allow them to adapt to changing circumstances and perhaps reappear when memories once thought lost become relevant again. Flowers grow from their bodies, bloom briefly, and are shed as they dry and fade, mirroring the gradual erosion of memory over time. The sculptures were coated in latex to create a smooth, skin-like surface and coloured using eyeshadow pigments, producing the appearance of cold, timeless creatures suspended between life and disappearance.

 

The installation presents these figures together with a detached set of stilt legs belonging to a creature that has already vanished—or perhaps to the figure melting into the floor, no longer capable of movement. Existing somewhere between presence and absence, the work explores the fragile nature of remembrance and the strange lives our memories continue to lead long after the people and moments that created them have passed.