Becoming, Unseen: A Material Study of Ageing and Visibility
This series began as a response to a brief: to find the extraordinary within the ordinary. I chose to explore this through the lens of ageing – specifically, the quiet, often overlooked ways in which women accumulate depth, experience, and presence over time, yet are rendered increasingly invisible within contemporary culture.
I became interested in how visibility itself is conditional. Using polarising filters and layered transparent materials, I sought to reveal phenomena that exist but are not immediately perceptible – interference colours, internal tensions, and subtle shifts that only emerge under specific conditions. In doing so, the work draws a parallel with ageing: that beauty, complexity, and richness are not absent, but often require a different mode of attention to be seen.
Rather than framing ageing as loss, this series attempts to illuminate it as a site of accumulation and transformation. What is overlooked in everyday life can, when viewed differently, become vivid, intricate, and undeniable.
Becoming, Unseen. A series of six photographic images.
A Material Study of Ageing and Visibility
This series reflects a cultural paradox: as women age and their experiences deepen, they often become less visible within social structures that privilege youth, surface, and immediacy.
Through an autoethnographic and documentary lens, employing layers of transparent plastic progressively accumulated and photographed under controlled conditions. Each composition is constructed through the addition of successive layers, imaged on a lightbox with polarized filters, revealing interference colours, internal tensions, and emergent visual densities that remain imperceptible under ordinary observation. The work situates itself within materialist and embodied frameworks, proposing that complexity is not absent in the everyday, but rendered invisible without specific modes of attention and mediation.
The act of layering functions as a performative analogue for lived experience, particularly as it accumulates across time in the lives of women.
Each added layer signifies memory, labour, care, and embodied knowledge. Each added layer is, in itself, barely perceptible; yet cumulatively, they produce a density and depth that reflects the complexity of women’s lived experience.
Early compositions remain open and legible, while later images become compressed, obscured, and more complex to resolve.
By framing layering as both method and metaphor, the series positions ageing not as decline, but as the formation of complex, internally rich structures. It invites a reconsideration of visibility itself, suggesting that what becomes unseen is not absence, but a failure of perception.
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