Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
Idun-Tawiah crops the faces away entirely and lets cloth and skin and stone carry the whole photograph. A man in a pale buttoned waistcoat sits at the left; a woman leans into him in a rose-print dress, a second floral fabric pooling across her lap, the sprigged pattern repeating in soft grey blooms. Beneath and behind them spreads a bed of rounded pebbles, each stone modelled by hard sunlight. The image is almost entirely surfaces, and it insists that we read tenderness through them.
At the centre, her hand rests over his, fingers loosely interlaced on the knee, a ring just visible. This is the vernacular grammar of the keepsake and the family album, the clasped hands that generations of studio portraits have used to say belonging. Idun-Tawiah knows that grammar and quotes it precisely, then strips it of the reassuring face, so that the gesture must stand alone, more fragile and more physical for having no smile to soften it.
The materiality is the meaning. Floral cotton, the smooth weave of the waistcoat, the coarse indifferent stones, the black-and-white film grain that flattens all of it into one memory-toned register: these are the textures from which the series builds its invented past. Nothing is said on purpose, the title admits, and that is the point. What the photograph preserves is not a statement but a touch, held long enough for the shutter, offered to memory the way a pressed flower is folded into a book.