Memories are a fickle thing. Finding their home in the slippery context of our psyche, to look back is fleeting and abstract. Like a folding clock, what we once were edits and blurs with who we are in the present. The most banal features of the past acquire value, even longing, by virtue of being the irrecoverable experience of our younger selves.

Acknowledging liminality as a space of both trauma and transformation, Mack’s suspended, ceramic installation Dream Avenue gives the viewer permission to find comfort in standing ‘at the threshold’. Positioned in the exhibition space’s entryway, fragile, porcelain symbols of sailing boats, perforated spheres and impressed ‘leaves’ cascade in a fragile tensity. Hung in an archway formation, the work reminisces on the Foša Land Gate, a historical landmark located in Croatia’s Adriatic Coast. The teetering fragmentation of the work as a whole come to terms with an uncertain, fleeting entry way into the unknown. The physical act of passing through this archway translates feelings of displacement and a state of inbetween, indicating Mack’s reflexive migrant experience. The transformative quality of porcelain and the artist’s process of impressing the surface of clay further conveys this sense of loss and separation of cultural connections. Here, clay harkens its cyclical ability to be formed, fired, used and discarded back to its original state. Complexities of cultural authenticity are highlighted through the artist’s act of imprinting each piece, and the shadows cast by these delicate forms ask questions of the real and the imagined. Twisting and turning in the breezes’ gentle waves, the installation evokes a coastal essence, and the sense of wistful transience. So it seems, when you live with a history of loss, the things you are able to keep, to hold on to and cherish – these become the shape of home.