Sarah Deane, 2025, image and audio 4:48 mins
What remains when we disappear from living memory? When all that's left are traces and fragments of our existence, what was our purpose, and what compels us to explore the voids others leave behind?
These questions arise as I piece together the life of my great aunt Dr Annie Deane, who passed away before I was born — a relationship defined by absence. Annie was a pioneering spirit and a constant in the community, tending to their medical needs for over thirty years. Yet she left surprisingly few footprints. Rather than attempting to fill the gaps in Annie's story, All that is solid… finds comfort in the unknown, recognising that the spaces she left behind are as essential to understanding her as any tangible trace.
Through found and generated images, I look for the essence of Annie, inhabiting the liminal spaces where memory meets imagination, and presence meets absence. Through AI collaboration, the fragments become starting points for new kinds of traces — visual speculations that live in the space between what we know and what we imagine. Here, the incompleteness of her history becomes not a problem to be solved, but a generative space where absences collaborate in creating meaning — the hole in the doughnut that makes the doughnut whole.
All that is solid… reveals how everything exists in constant transformation, where boundaries between past and present, memory and imagination, life and death, become fluid and permeable — a space where the holes and the whole exist in constant dialogue.
These questions arise as I piece together the life of my great aunt Dr Annie Deane, who passed away before I was born — a relationship defined by absence. Annie was a pioneering spirit and a constant in the community, tending to their medical needs for over thirty years. Yet she left surprisingly few footprints. Rather than attempting to fill the gaps in Annie's story, All that is solid… finds comfort in the unknown, recognising that the spaces she left behind are as essential to understanding her as any tangible trace.
Through found and generated images, I look for the essence of Annie, inhabiting the liminal spaces where memory meets imagination, and presence meets absence. Through AI collaboration, the fragments become starting points for new kinds of traces — visual speculations that live in the space between what we know and what we imagine. Here, the incompleteness of her history becomes not a problem to be solved, but a generative space where absences collaborate in creating meaning — the hole in the doughnut that makes the doughnut whole.
All that is solid… reveals how everything exists in constant transformation, where boundaries between past and present, memory and imagination, life and death, become fluid and permeable — a space where the holes and the whole exist in constant dialogue.
Sarah Deane is a visual artist exploring how personal and cultural histories are remembered, forgotten, and reimagined — particularly through the lives of women. Through photography, collage, and archival materials, she layers, fragments, and reconstructs images to revisit personal and cultural histories, with a focus on memory, place, and transformation. She was recently awarded a bursary from Galway Arts Centre and Galway Culture Company, as well as funding from Galway County Council, to experiment with AI in her visual arts practice. Her work All that is solid… received Honourable Mentions in the AI categories of the Tokyo International Foto Awards and the B&W International Photography Awards.
sarahdeane.com
@deanesphoto
sarahdeane.com
@deanesphoto