Becoming, Unseen

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.