You can see the presentation Holding the Haunting: Listening to Silence in the Archive as part of Inclusive Museum conference or read more about the work here:
Holding the Haunting: Listening to Silence in the Archive
When we think of archives, we often picture drawers of letters, boxes of photographs, or catalogues of artworks — a vast record of what has been saved. But archives also tell us something else: what has been left out. They are shaped as much by silence, omission, and erasure as by what is present.
Silence is not simply an absence. It is an active force, one that we encounter every time a biography is missing, a work is undocumented, or a life goes unrecorded. In my recent research and creative practice, I’ve been asking: how can we engage with archival silences without rushing to fill them? Can silence itself become a meaningful, even restorative, presence?
A Collection of Presences and Absences
My case study is A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection, which gathers paintings and records of David Bomberg and his students, known as the Borough Group. While rich in Modern British art, the collection also contains gaps — missing correspondence, under-documented women artists like Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann, and works kept largely in storage. These silences reveal the structural exclusions that shape how art history has been told.
Rather than treating those absences as mistakes to be fixed, I’ve been exploring how we might work with them.
Breathing in the Archive
This interest began with an earlier experiment: Breathing in the Borough Road Archive (2019). This twelve-part audio meditation invited participants to sit on a rug and “breathe in” the aura of paintings, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura.
But the paintings themselves weren’t there. Instead, their dimensions were marked as cut-outs in marbled wallpaper. Poems accompanied each outline, encouraging participants to imagine the works through sound and suggestion rather than sight.
As one excerpt instructed:
“Your exchange is with the air around you.
There will be colour and motion.
Every painting is different.
Please listen for your first instruction…”
Pauses, silences, and spaces were as important as the words. Participants didn’t see the works — they imagined them. Absence became central to the experience.
A Placeless Audio Guide
Building on this, my current project is a placeless audio guide for the Sarah Rose Collection. Unlike a traditional gallery guide, it isn’t tied to a physical location. It can be listened to anywhere — in a park, at home, on a walk.
The guide uses voice, environmental sound, and intentional silence to invite listeners to reflect on what is missing in the archive. Rather than narrating artworks in authoritative detail, it foregrounds erasures and untold stories, asking listeners to sit with what cannot be known.
Silence here is not a lack to be corrected, but a presence to be respected.
Silence, Forgetting, and Care
Thinking about silence also means thinking about forgetting. I was struck by reading about hyperthymesia, or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, a rare condition where people cannot forget. While enviable at first glance, it highlights the usefulness — even necessity — of forgetting. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggested, silence and forgetting can be forms of release, a way of making space for reflection and renewal.
In archival work, this means acknowledging the violence of past erasures without trying to overwrite them. Instead, we can cultivate spaces where silence is listened to, where audiences reflect on its presence, and where care becomes central to interpretation.
Why Silence Matters
Silence is not neutral. It reflects power, exclusion, and choices about what — and who — is remembered. But silence can also be a generative space: a chance to pause, to imagine, to listen differently.
Through projects like Breathing in the Borough Road Archive and the ongoing placeless audio guide, I want to explore how experimental, sound-based approaches can open up those spaces. By treating silence not as a deficit but as a presence, we might create more inclusive, reflective, and ethical ways of engaging with archives.
If you’d like to follow the development of the placeless audio guide or hear excerpts from the earlier project, stay tuned — I’ll be sharing updates and recordings as the work unfolds.