Hand-made photographic composite from found 35mm slides by visual artist, Lindsay Perth.

These artworks evoke a familiar yet ultimately disrupted sense of place and time. In A Sense of Someplace, Perth creates an ongoing series of hand-made composite photographs formed from pairs of 35mm slides drawn from found or discarded family archives. By physically combining two slide transparencies from two places and times, the work constructs new, speculative narratives that speak to the present, while exposing the instability and entropic nature of memory and our access to the past.

Two slides. One slide mount. 100% analogue.

Selected prints now available at Arteri Print Shop

I work with anonymous family archives, found and discarded 35mm slides —images made by individuals documenting their own lives, relationships, travels, and everyday experiences. Here, photography is a tool that informs how the past is remembered, shaping memory and identity.

From this anonymous material, I construct composite images by hand, placing two slides into a single slide mount. Each work deliberately brings together separate lives and separate moments in time, creating intersections between unrelated personal narratives and experiences. The resulting images hold two timelines within one frame, allowing different pasts to occupy the same visual and temporal space.

My composites explore the tension between the familiar—the nostalgic aesthetic of aged 35mm film—and the unfamiliar, created through unexpected image pairings. All contain undertones of distortion and warp, of the ethereal and surreal, and the emotional punctum arises when the viewer reads, accepts, and engages with the new narrative that the images create.

This body of work explores the instability of memory and the past as a liminal condition. Memory is treated not as a fixed record, but as something in flux—familiar yet unreliable, recognisable yet continually shifting. . The images in ‘A Sense of Someplace’ exist on a threshold between clarity and dissolution, reflecting the way personal and collective histories are recalled, misremembered, and re-formed over time. Each image seeks to hold the flux of memory long enough to create new meaning.

Visually, the work remains seductive through the recognisable aesthetic of analogue photography. This familiarity draws the viewer in, establishing trust before quietly unsettling it. What is presented is not a reconstruction of the past, but a threshold moment in which memory and time are open to reinterpretation.