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...
Collaborations
Laleh's artistic practice centres on the relationship between materiality and perception; how objects carry meaning and transform through interaction. While her work has long explored wearable sculpture and the expressive potential of materials, her recent collaboration with Bodyscapes, a collective of dance students from AUB’s BA (Hons) Dance course, took this inquiry into dynamic new territory.
Through four dance exhibitions, the students examined how the body navigates an ever-shifting landscape – both physical and digital, confronting themes of identity, transformation, and control. One of the performances, Viewpoint, explored movement in a world reshaped by AI. Wearing Laleh’s jewellery during their performance, the dancers responded to the Design; Disruption; Divergence exhibition at TheGallery in a performance that blurred the roles of artist and observer.
This cross-disciplinary exchange became a meaningful dialogue between visual art and performance. For Laleh, witnessing her jewellery in motion shifted her perspective entirely. No longer static forms but instead responsive extensions of the body, what had once been seen as fixed became something performative, activated and fluid.
As the performers integrated her pieces into their movements, the jewellery evolved into interactive agents responding to rhythm, space and energy. This experience invited new questions into her practice:
- What happens when jewellery ceases to be an object and becomes an event?
- How might materials respond to kinetic energy in real time, adapting to motion?
- Can jewellery serve as a bridge between the tactile and the ephemeral – an object that's also an experience?
This collaboration became a full-bodied exploration of performance, perception, and form. In synergy with movement and costume design, the jewellery became part of a multi-dimensional experience. The project reaffirmed Laleh’s commitment to working at the intersection of sculpture, fine art, and adornment. Seeing her work activated through performance opened new conceptual and material possibilities, ones she is excited to continue exploring.
