Souping The Remains Of My Childhood

Abstract

This research investigates the fragility and persistence of memory through black-and-white film photography, using transformation as both a material and conceptual strategy to evoke the experience of fading childhood recollections. Souping, a technique in which photographic film is submerged in various food-based or chemical ingredients, induces unpredictable reactions that alter the film’s emulsion. Through these disrupted surfaces, I visualise the emotional residue of the past, where memory and material decay intersect.

Driven by a longing for the past, my practice begins with fieldwork: returning to sites of personal significance such as childhood homes, playgrounds, bush tracks, and suburban streets. These revisits act as emotional searches, where I re-encounter familiar spaces marked by time. Using a range of analogue cameras, including 120mm, 35mm, and 16mm film, I document these locations and write on-site diary entries that capture sensory details, fleeting emotions, and embodied memories.

In the studio, my home laboratory becomes a site of quiet transformation. Here, I conduct souping experiments in a pseudo-scientific manner, immersing film in jars filled with various solutions and carefully observing their slow, unpredictable changes. Each jar becomes a vessel of memory, where chemical reaction and emotional resonance merge. This process reflects, observes, and notes the film’s transformation, which mirrors the fragmented, shifting nature of remembering.

The installation unfolds within the home laboratory, which functions simultaneously as a working studio and exhibition site. In this space, the boundaries between process and presentation dissolve. Soup jars line the shelves like specimens; some have film while others present dissolved memories, only holding the residue of memories that are blurred and fading. These are displayed alongside printed images from the souped negatives and excerpts from my diary entries. The installation operates as a contemplative environment, where images, text, and recorded soup act as a form of healing memory. It resists fixed outcomes; instead, it exists as a living archive—shifting, unstable, and unresolved—mirroring recollection’s fragile, mutable nature.