Punctum (Future Nostalgia) is Kate Daudy’s response to her one-month residency in Meteora Greece.

In Punctum (Future Nostalgia) Daudy explores the poetics of objects. Much like the technological motherboard, Punctum constructs an assemblage of different components that, when combined, communicate a sense of the artist’s life. While exploring Meteora, Daudy has created and gathered objects that symbolise her family, travels, home, work. These objects embody the joys of the artist’s life; they are not essential but speak to her spirit and remind the artist of the sweetness of life.

Displaying these objects on a series of shelves, the artist explains “this is my sarcophagus, this is my tomb […] I have made objects about all the things I like about being alive [and] when I am dead, I will take these memories with me.” Some of the objects reflect this intent to not only record the life of the artist but to equip her with the materials to journey into the afterlife. One shelf even displays the coins in which to pay the man who will charter the boat on the river to the afterlife. To create Future Nostalgia, to anticipate a future longing for the past in the present moment, disturbs our construction of linearly progressive time. Here, time feels more cyclical and flowing, or perhaps more elastic, capable of stretching forward, moving backwards, or staying in the present.

The history of Christian art and iconography is a history of a visual language. Particular stories, places and people can be ‘read’ through the objects, colours, and poses of the figures and scenes. In a similar way, Daudy’s installation explores a semiotics of identity, exploring how objects can represent the people that have travelled into the afterlife. The use of ceramics here is not accidental, but continues the entanglement between the body, life, death and the earth. If, as many religions describe, the human body is clay or earth blessed with life and consciousness, then Daudy’s use of ceramics works to embody her identity and life. In Punctum death is not the afterlife but a part of life itself; merely the transformation of form. In this way, the body is framed as a vessel, one of many forms a person will take as they embark on the cycle of life.