Exhibition overview
Traces of Memory: Sculpting the Ephemeral presents a collection of jewellery works from Laleh Ghavami, a multidisciplinary artist and maker. The jewellery works transcend conventional adornment, inhabiting the liminal space between wearable art and sculptural form. These meticulously crafted pieces serve as material manifestations of memory, absence, and transformation—each one a tangible vessel for intangible experience.
The exhibition showcases works that begin their journey in wax – a responsive medium that captures the artist's gestures, hesitations, and intentions before undergoing the alchemical transformation into enduring metal. Through this process, momentary impressions become permanent records, preserving the ephemeral within the eternal.
Drawing from the artist's background in biophysics and informed by their fine art training, these works explore the tension between scientific precision and intuitive creation. Each piece embodies the artist's auto-ethnographic approach, where personal displacement narratives and cultural intersections materialise in metal and form.
As the jewellery interacts with the body in motion, it creates a continuous dialogue between wearer, object, and environment – challenging fixed notions of identity and belonging. These aren't static artefacts, but dynamic participants in an ongoing conversation about presence and absence, roots and displacement, memory and forgetting.
The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate how we embody our histories, how we carry our memories, and how the objects we choose to adorn ourselves with become extensions of our evolving identities – bridging past and present, here and elsewhere, the fleeting and the enduring.
Meet the artist
Laleh Ghavami
Laleh Ghavami is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work delves into themes of identity, boundaries...
