Medium: Paper
Materials: tea, found rust and plants used to eco-dye cartridge paper, digital manipulation of Google Earth imagery and family photographs, frottage impressions, drawing, silver pendant, ink, and eco-dyed thread.
Dimensions: 17 x 17 x 1 cm (closed), 17 x 34 x 1 cm (open).
Palimpsest of Place is an intimate excavation of personal history, where Mackay’s textured streetscapes merge with the topography of my life. The book is both a map and a memory—its pages etched with frottage impressions, stains of tea and rust, and fragmented aerial views and photographs tracing the violent undercurrents my familial past.
Walking through Mackay with this little book became a method of witnessing—each rub, stain, and mark capturing the city’s surfaces while echoing the unseen violence embedded within place and personal history. The urban fabric, often read as neutral, reveals its wounds: colonial imprints, environmental decay, and social fractures—mirroring my lineage.
By layering frottage, digital manipulations, and print/dyeing techniques, the book becomes a palimpsest where personal stories and public histories collide. It creates a dialogue between trauma lingering within bodies and landscapes, and an acknowledgment of how both spaces hold memory, loss, and eventually understanding.
Finalist in Libris Book Prize (2025).