Between 1987 and 1990, in Sri Lanka, detainees taken into custody did not return

The state recorded them only as ‘disappeared.’ It is a misconception that what cannot be seen is something which does not, or did not, exist; that
to have ‘disappeared’ from sight is the same thing as a presence erased. Glass Turned Steel is a work made from glass shards, steel, and wood— found objects that are subsequently charged with personal and collective memory through acts of re-contextualisation and re-assembly. Here, the precarious sculpture rests on a domestic bookshelf, as though an object from a personal
archive, a marker of a particular moment in time. But its modest scale and familiar setting belie the gravity of what it holds, turning the quotidian environment into a site of reckoning.

I remember…

Time has worn off some detail, yet some memories remain deeply rooted, refusing the softening that happens over time.

Glass Turned Steel not only evinces the physical endurance of memory; it also brings to light that state erasures leave a piercing echo behind, persisting as memories, still visible when light catches their sharp, jagged edges. Here, histories and ‘disappearances’ are made visible and tangible through the tactility and metaphorical potential of glass. Suppressed memories can pierce through the smooth veneer of official history. And by looking through this work, through the sharp translucence of glass, we see what the state once sought to render invisible. In this act of seeing, Glass Turned Steel becomes both memorial and defiance, an assertion that the disappeared persists in memory, light, and material form. (Text: Tia Madden)

Made in collaboration with Bargo Men’s Shed (Peter Sutton and John Wooton) and with thanks to Lisa Barett.