The Trance, The Trace

The Trance, The Trace is an expedition to find love in the archives. Mapping three generations of women in image, natural dye and fibre, it holds matrilineal memory-keepers as sacred.The act of remembrance becomes a portal to otherworlds and ways of being

I am looking for love in the archives. For rage, for sorrow, for longing, belonging and everything in between. Inspired by Mati Diop's Dahomey and its meditation on what it means for objects to return, this project explores both restitution and re-rooting. In recovering what was hidden or obscured, it centres on an embodied navigation of the layered histories of people and place. I think of each work as a portal to the otherworlds, a way of gathering strength to tend to our inner landscapes and transform the world around us.

The Trance, The Trace began in conversation with my own family’s archive after my grandmother’s passing. She had lost the ability to speak due to a long-term illness, and with that I lost the opportunity to ask questions about her life and the women who came before her. I felt my experience mapped more broadly, in thinking about how the intimate, domestic, and relational lives of Black women are a persistent gap in institutional archives. Their stories circulate outside institutions, often passed through food, clothes, objects and oral tradition rather than an image alone.

The Trance, The Trace answers that gap by building an archive in communion with the women it documents. In the Roach family home, I photographed three generations of women in a moment of reunion. Over a shared meal, I encountered stories of joy, resistance, resilience, speculative worldbuilding and present-day parables. I collected the onion skins from this meal as a dye source, colouring photo-printed napkins and tea towels with the Yoruba tradition of adire. Waste becomes pigment, pigment becomes portrait, portrait becomes archive. I built the frame by hand, a slow labour that mirrors the care it takes to pass stories down through generations. Just as Diop gives voice to the treasures returning from Paris to Benin, I wanted the materials themselves to carry the human stories that shaped them.

Working in textile brings into view a craft long dismissed as women’s work and domestic labour, and positions the women photographed as co-authors of their own record through acts of radical intimacy. In a time of climate crisis and digital saturation, the slow and sustainable process of natural dyeing marks a return to the body, to the earth, and to what diasporic communities have always known about living alongside it.

Stretching photography beyond documentation, The Trance, The Trace treats the archive as a collective and reparative space where memory and material entangle. Image, dye and fibre interlace into a social weaving in which personal and political lineages leave their trace, and thread becomes a conduit between generations, carrying histories of displacement and return. It is an offering, a meditation on how we might build our own archives, and a roadmap for futures we are still imagining. The archive, for me, must be a living, breathing, tangible space, because how we remember is how we invite ourselves to be.