Exploring the pages of my family’s archive of photographs, I found myself attached to a time before I was born. These photographs captured the nine years between mine and the childhood of my three siblings as my family migrated to and from Bali and Sydney. Across dozens of photographs, found in different homes was the furniture that would make up Fruit of the Room.
Fruit of the Room is a response to and an interrogation of the capacity of generational memory within the Balinese Australian diaspora. Through modelling furniture from family archive photographs taken in the 9 years before I was born, I offer these objects a breath to claim their witness to a family, a life I could never know. Layered with interviews with my siblings, the imagined home illuminates the synthesis of immemorial and recollection. The transition between photographs to the 3D model, while offering a new form of remembering, anchors itself, like all forms of memory, as fragile, fleeting and incomplete.
