Trace

Trace weaves together ideas of care, memory, and connection, unfolding the many ways our lives overlap. It considers how a sense of place is shaped through stories, nostalgia, the marks we leave behind, and the people and rituals that gather us together. Meals, maps, and migration each carry traces of humanness: tangled, shifting, and complex.

This exhibition brings together works from two separate, yet intertwined projects. SUGO, a previous project, reflects on the intimate ways relationships and acts of care are expressed through cooking. Preparing and sharing meals becomes a way to preserve memory and closeness, even as relationships change, holding on to the quiet presence of care embedded in a dish made by another.

The more recent works emerge from time spent documenting and exploring a small village in Molise, Italy, the place where the artist's family originally emigrated from. This village becomes a focal point for reflecting on origins — how we understand our ways of being and navigating the world by tracing back through the places, people, and recipes that have shaped us.

Across the exhibition, the works find common ground in their layered consideration of patterns as records of care, movement, and memory, as well as the attention held within small details and ornamentation. The strawberry pattern in the artist’s nonna’s kitchen reappears in ornate wrought-iron gates. The movements of hands stirring a pot of sugo or shaping pasta dough — passed down from generation to generation — echo the flight patterns of swallows, zigzagging through the sky to feed or to find their way home. A map can help us trace these lines too, drawn on a piece of paper by a friend. Patterns are made of repetitions: traces of movements, memories in motion, maps to follow, silent threads of understanding. Through care, knowledge, and curiosity, nothing exists in isolation — every mark carries the hidden presence of others.

Moving between fact and fiction, intimacy and distance, the works in Trace layer together ceramics, printmaking, film, and drawing. The exhibition invites us to notice how meaning itself is layered and multifaceted, existing at once in the places we inhabit, the stories we tell, and the meals we share.