Naomi Hart

Artist statement

My work addresses absence and loss, physicality and space, interaction and communication. I am interested in how we use material objects to memorialise events, people and moments in time. We archive objects as an attempt to provide tangible links to inevitably fading memories, precarious in their permanence. Banal and ubiquitous objects become fetishised, acquiring value through their role as signifiers, tracking memories and defining our identities.

I am also fascinated with the relationship we have with dust, dirt and the physical traces of existence that we leave behind us. I have for a long time been engaged in an ongoing practice of collecting, archiving and recording materials including the clusters of hair and dust that gather in my home. Like domestic tumbleweed, these delicate structures are formed as a result of the gradual disintegration of objects and matter. These physiological cast-offs contain traces of existence, a natural archiving of presence and absence within a space.

Through my interest in absence and what remains I have also become engaged in a visual enquiry into the ways in which ideas can be expressed and then erased, leaving a space where an expression is muted, and can no longer be received.

I work with analogue photographic processes to explore ideas and images that I sometimes choose to translate using drawing, painting and video. I am an artist teacher, and balance by own studio practice with teaching fine art and photography and exploring academic enquiries within art education.