Dainesha Nugent-Palache

Lives and works in Toronto, ON, Canada

Artist statement

My artwork flirts with anthropological and archaeological realms, often created as a result of familial digging. The soil on which my maternal great-grandmother was born is a talisman, beauty is both virtue and a weapon. From this intimate point of origin, my inquiry expands outward toward broader structures of consumerism, colonialism, and the ongoing imperialist pursuit of possession that determines who owns land, who extracts from it, who is left to live in the aftermath, shaping what we inherit and choose to covet. I work across photography, experimental darkroom processes, sculpture. writing, and sound, as different pressures applied to the same set of questions. My materials are the foundation of my work. I arrive at a point of inquiry through observation of the seemingly mundane, stopping to consider the material makeup of the structures that hold, confine, and contain us, while living in the afterlife of property. I have been working with drywall as a primary medium, fascinated by the idea that selenite healing crystals are the same thing as gypsum which is just drywall. A material record of extraction processed into the domestic surface, concealed in industrial drag. Through the dissection of extractive materials in their raw and processed forms, I hope to reveal how our landscapes and built environments conceal unpleasant truths about the systems we collectively inhabit and perpetuate.

Artwork