I often thought of the archive as a place – a room, a collection, a body of material – that promises access to the past. But in my own practice, the archive has never quite behaved like that.
Rather than a fixed space, it operates beyond its moment of formation. Images, objects and encounters do not settle into preservation; they remain active, capable of reappearing under changed conditions. The archive, in this sense, is less a container of memory than a structure that hosts relationships across time.
What draws my attention is not the stability of archival material but its recurrence: the way a postcard can return as a site for re-walking, a photograph can shift meaning through recontextualisation, or a conversation can acquire significance years later. Even a single object dormant within my archive can become the starting point for entirely new relations when it re-enters the present.
It is not photography, community engagement, or archival research alone that defines this practice, but a condition of latency.
Things wait.
The postcard waits.
The glass negative waits.
A walk waits until it is repeated.
A spoken fragment waits for another body to re-activate it.
Meaning is not fixed when an object enters the archive, but remains suspended until new relationships bring it into operation.
This approach has emerged across a series of interconnected works. In Photographs from Another Place, archival material and engagement became inseparable, with participants contributing images, memories and objects that entered the work as active agents rather than illustrations of history. Amongst these – an unused gift – a 1902 glass negative depicting Church Island, Menai. The negative remained dormant within my archive for ten years before returning through a new set of relationships.
In Nothing Remained Unchanged but the Clouds, analogue WWI postcards were extended through collage, digital processes and collaboration with co-artist Jeffrey Knopf. Rather than stabilising meaning, these processes revealed how images continue to shift after their production, opening alternative temporalities within a single frame.
Sharing the Menai glass negative with an Anglesey-based artist friend, the date of the negative was identified as that of the postponed coronation of Edward VII. This extended the enquiry into an ongoing exchange. Period postcards and newspaper clippings were shared through a postal conversation, each response shaping the work. Fieldwalking, photographic response and collaboration developing from these materials. Currently, the work exists not as a completed project but as an unfolding set of relations organised around a once dormant image.
Across these works, I have come to understand the archive less as a repository of fixed material than as something that hosts relationships across time. Meaning emerges not through preservation, but through return – of places, gestures and conversations.
Perhaps this is where haunting begins: not within objects themselves, but in the moment they return and ask to be encountered differently.
Now I think the archive asks something quieter of us: to return, to look again, and to recognise that some things have not yet finished speaking.
