Scattering the cremated ashes of my grandfather onto photographic paper as photograms, a vision of the universe appears in which one can see almost as far back in time as the Big Bang, reconnecting the remains of the dead with the origin of all life. Through the trace cast by the ash, a black hole emerges in which the void left by the other is made evident.

In Michael Newman’s critique of Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, he writes that one may mourn the subject of whom nothing remains but ash through recourse to the trace whose nature is always defined by it’s propensity to complete erasure, interpreting Derrida as perceiving in such a trace the revelation of life’s metaphysical origin. Through the trace left by the ash, a black hole emerges in which the void left by the other is made evident, questioning the photograph as a sublime object where the limits of our imagination are revealed.