Beneath showcases Ceitas Atelier’s Prologue, research into Australian artists, and an index of stimuli to effectively curate it’s desired presence.
Prologue
Design - Christian Duyckers
Investigative Research, Conversations
Maps That Melt The Memory of Ice
Visual Compendium - Ceitas Atelier
Shells, 2024.
Photographing seashells is more than a way of admiring their beauty; it is a means of engaging closely with the details of the natural world. The camera forces attention to aspects often overlooked: the intricate spirals, the subtle ridges, and the way light plays across the surface.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
Photography - Christian Duyckers
Stimuli Index
Ceitas reliably credits these artists where due. The use of these images is purely for innovative purposes, cultivating as an index of stimuli.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition: "New Itineraries", Musée de'Elysée,
Lausanne, June 13 - September 8, 1991
Measurements: 58.6 × 92.7 × 36.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1985.
©The estate of Inge King
David Noonan, 2017, Common Editions.
Jungjin Lee, 2025
Sidney Nolan, 1940.
Oil on canvas, mounted on composition board, 73.3 x 88.2 cm
Barbara Hepworth, London, 1943-1958.
Plaster on wood base.
12 ⅞ x 15¾ x 11⅞ in
Hashimoto Naotsugu, 2003. 11.2 × 6.2 cm
Alexander Calder, 1936.
Lignum vitae, walnut wood, paint and steel rods.
51⅞ x 24¼ x 11⅜ in
Deborah Turbeville, 1976.
High Diver I
Gerhard Richter, 1965. Oil On Canvas 190 x 110cm
Provoke Group, Tokyo, Nitesha, 2023
Each piece carries an emotional charge—a quiet requiem for what is vanishing. The title itself—Maps that Melt the Memory of Ice— suggests the paradox that the art is a record even as it mourns.
In pausing over these airy maps, we become acutely aware that these forms are snapshots in a climate in crisis. Laurence’s fragile, layered surfaces compel us to linger on details of form and loss, offering a visual vocabulary for memory and mourning.
Visually, the works suggest charts or atlases, but they are maps to no fixed geography. Instead, they chart absence, transition, and memory. The forms float like aerial views of terrain breaking apart, or like scientific slides observed under a microscope. To stand before these panels is to feel both the beauty of crystalline form and the sorrow of knowing that the ice which inspired them is vanishing. They invite viewers to read them as records and elegies simultaneously: works that mourn as they preserve.
What makes Maps that Melt the Memory of Ice so resonant is the way it fuses ecological knowledge with poetic imagination. The series arises directly from fieldwork—time spent among glaciers, observing their textures, colours, and fragility—yet it transforms those observations into artworks that stir memory and affect. These are not literal representations of the ice but translations of its aura, its rhythms, and its slow collapse. Light plays through the resin, catching the pigments so that each piece shifts with the viewer’s movement, mimicking the play of sunlight on ice floes. This mutability makes the works feel alive, as though still in the process of melting.
In the broader context of Laurence’s career, the series crystallises her enduring commitment to making art as a form of witness. By turning glacial pigment into an artistic medium, she collapses the space between scientific evidence and aesthetic experience. Her works become vessels of memory, preserving traces of what is disappearing and presenting them in a form that speaks as much to the heart as to the intellect. They compel viewers to contemplate the enormity of climate change not through statistics, but through intimate, material encounter.
Maps that Melt the Memory of Ice stands as a lyrical meditation on time, loss, and the precarious beauty of
the natural world. Each panel is fragile yet commanding, ephemeral yet enduring. Together, they form a body of work that both mourns and memorialises, offering a cartography
of absence that is deeply moving. Laurence does not simply depict the melting of ice; she translates its memory into luminous surfaces that invite us to linger, to feel awe and grief at once, and to recognise our own place within the unfolding story of a warming planet.
©© 2025 Ceitas Atelier. All rights reserved.
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