Group Projects
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
I went back to Italy last year with my three adult children. Part of it was to rest, to step away from the life I’ve built elsewhere, but mostly, I wanted to show my kids where their father comes from. I wanted to give them something of me that words alone - so many words - had never quite managed to translate.
I thought I could map my past onto the present. That I could walk them through it, piece by piece. This is where… and this is where… and this is where… Tracing maps along the way.
I showed them the steps outside the small church in my hometown where I used to sit for hours reading books. I showed them the park where I used to study Latin those long spring afternoons with my best friend. I stood in front of my old school and tried to explain the noise, the running, the feeling of being young and living life back then - a life that does not exist anymore - when I was certain the world was full of possibilities.
But everywhere I turned, the past slipped just out of reach.
“This used to be an ice-cream parlour,” I said, though it wasn’t anymore. “That bank there, it was a record store once.” I tried to place my father’s house in a space now occupied by something newer, taller, unfamiliar: some horrible building blocks. “That was the main cinema”, while I pointed at a new supermarket. Only the local pasticceria seemed untouched, as if it had quietly resisted time while everything else moved on.
I think I had imagined something impossible, that I might step back into a version of myself that still belonged there, wanting to recognise someone or be recognised. Hoping that a familiar face might appear and anchor me, even briefly, to that place again.
I went back to Italy thinking I could find where I used to belong, finding the shape of time itself, forever moving forward (“Life flies and never stops an hour” wrote the poet), leaving specks of dust behind.
I guess I was searching for all that lost time.
Alexandra Nemaric
Darcey Bella Arnold
Ellie Chalmers-Robinson
Katie Paine
15 August - 5 September, 2026
Glasshouse Project Space
44 Glasshouse Rd, Collingwood (entrance upstairs from Gertrude Glasshouse)
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
This exhibition is possible thanks to the generous support of Michael Schwarz and David Clouston