Filmed at a palliative care unit in Colorado in 2019, TRACES is a feature length documentary, single-channel moving image work utilising thermal imaging cameras to record heat leaving the human body after death, rendering two figures as glowing white forms - monochromatic, painterly and visceral.

A man and woman lie alone in separate hospital rooms. Eyes closed. A series of diary-like memories unspool as fragmentary spectral images; a figure plunges into a swimming pool, a crowded street, a young couple taking a shower together. The images hover somewhere between shared memory and the world as it continues outside the bounds of twinned hospice rooms.

In a moment, we find ourselves back with the man and woman; a hand twitches, an open mouth, the rhythm of shallow, laboured breathing. Finally at the moment of death, the thermal camera begins to register the man and woman’s bodies’ heat diminishing, as their hands and faces white luminance slowly fade to black.

Seeing the world through this enhanced eye, TRACES roots itself in a pre-linguistic form of observance. A vision of transformational, delimited pure sensation, the two figures become pulsating, sculptural forms that extend Spinoza’s theory of embodied immanence.

Like embers in a fire, these incorporeal tableau co-exist in a fluid space that actively responds to the drifts, influences and adaptations of what was previously invisible. TRACES suspends the tension between the embodied and the transient, the inside and the outside, floating above and across these fixed parameters to suggest the possibility of new forms of knowledge outside rigid categories of grief, decay and trauma.

TRACES thus allows the viewer to enter a fully embodied state of catharsis, a charged space of encounter and contemplation that - through its graphic yet impressionistic representation of two archetypal human forms - pulses on a perpetual continuum of transformation.

A visionary, unique work utilising previously unseen imagery of the human body beyond the point of death, TRACES is an emotionally rich, subjective meditation on impermanence bearing witness to the cycle of life and death as an alchemical protean force.