Ah! Summer grasses!

All that remains

Of the warriors' dreams.

- Matsuo Bashō (trans. R.H. Blyth(

Presented in the illusory quiet after war, Sharon Poliakine's exhibition is centered on the notion of the "ghost image," a term drawn from printmaking, concurrently evoking the spiritual realm. It is the faint residue of an earlier print, left on the plate, reappearing on paper of its own accord, like a phantom.

Poliakine maintains an ongoing dialogue with her earlier works. She explores the emergence and disappearance of the image, distilling its vestiges through processes of remembrance and forgetting, erasure and re-impression. Over three decades of printmaking, she has delved into the medium itself and its qualities, specifically as an intermediate realm between disciplines: the transformation of images as they shift from print to painting and sculpture, as well as the objects and remnants generated by these actions. Through this changing terrain, she continually probes the traces of life that endure as something is consumed.

The notion of the "ghost image" came into sharper focus as Poliakine studied Japanese woodblock prints from the museum's collection depicting historical battle scenes intended to commemorate and glorify the warriors' valor. Yet her gaze was drawn instead to their faded versos, where the heroic figures dissolve and lose their materiality. Her series of photographic prints obscures the memory of the original images, and with it their ethos of masculine power.

Hints and traces of the image summon the eye to linger in a liminal zone between presence and absence, where a faint echo persists before vanishing into the whiteness of the paper.

A series of small prints installed along the wall, titled Experience, introduces a musical rhythm that reverberates throughout the viewing experience. Like a travelogue, it is turbulent at times, then quieting and gradually dissolving into the pages of time. Meandering curves guide the hand across lined pages, forming endless loops. Countless paths are traced freehand directly onto the plate in these trial etchings. Their movement surfaces and recedes intermittently behind a veiled layer of silkscreen.

Installed at the heart of the space is a cluster of "cocoons"—massive white forms whose rounded protrusions suggest a state of liminality, as if poised to break through their taut skin; yet the energy remains imprisoned within them, and their presence remains enigmatic, mysterious, and shrouded. 

The transitional existence between two phases or conditions—death and rebirth—is known in Tibetan Buddhism as bardo. Everyday life, too, contains moments of bardo: in dream, meditation, or crisis. The predominantly white exhibition space simulates a dream state. The works draw the viewer into wakeful dreaming, staring, or open contemplation, as if consciousness were hovering in a field of memories or reflected through mist.

The exhibition seeks to touch the essence, the silence left in the aftermath of struggle. It asks how empty a work can be while still retaining its presence. Poliakine creates from annihilation through a process of purification.

Shir Meller-Yamaguchi

Curator

The exhibition was produced with the assistance of the Lottery Council for Culture and Art