Certain Pieces, 2020 is a collection of modest yet resonant objects – ceramics, stone tools, rusted metal fragments, and weathered glass shards – that recall an antecedent way of life. They are the remnants of imagined landscapes, whispered myths, and half-remembered fishing tales. While humble in material and form, their true value lies not in what they are, but in the process of unearthing them – the moment of discovery, charged with memory, intuition, and the quiet thrill of chance.
Many of these pieces were retrieved from the tidal zones and forested paths of Japan, gathered during walks through rural villages and along the ancient shell trade route that once stretched from Okinawa to Hokkaido. Others were found closer to home, embedded in the sediment of Sydney’s lower north shore – washed up, buried, or partially revealed after rain. These finds are not archaeological in the academic sense, but poetic recoveries: fragments of use, tokens of loss, each bearing silent witness to a forgotten gesture or a vanished place.
The collected items have been carefully amassed, sorted, and reconfigured upon the surface of a found Japanese tea tray – an antique square form crafted from solid hinoki (Japanese cypress), finished in a deep black lacquer. The tray, once a vessel for ritual, now becomes a frame, an arena, a void. Within its pitch-dark surface, the objects appear to levitate, suspended in a quiet theatre of meaning. The absence of ground gives each piece a peculiar weightlessness, while the rich blackness echoes both the interiority of memory and the depth of unknowing.
There is a dreamlike quality to this process, both in its execution and its origins. A few key objects – stone shapes, worn fragments – first revealed themselves in moments of lucid dreaming, arriving as flashes of intuitive knowing or as symbolic ‘wants’ before they were ever found. These dream-sent coordinates guided my movements, mapping routes across real terrain, leading me to specific fields, riverbeds, or coastal coves where the physical counterparts lay waiting. It is this blurring of inner vision and outer action that gives Certain Pieces its subtle metaphysical charge: the idea that an object can be dreamed into existence before it is located in the world.
In assembling these pieces, I am not seeking to preserve a past, but to reimagine it – less as history, more as vibration. The works do not claim certainty or chronology. Rather, they are fragments of possibility – keepers of untold narratives, emblems of imagined geographies, and offerings to the idea that meaning is something we uncover, not invent.
morgan veness 