05.

Notes on Distance & Return
2026

Nose Magazine
Editorial

We often conceptualise museums as facilities of preservation. However, this preservation tends to be associated with the objects behind the displays rather than the facility itself. In regular life, the objects and environments we interact with change in tandem with our bodies. When I return to a place after an extended hiatus, both the environment and my body have been weathered, amended, and aged by time. What was disorienting in this instance was that this museum seemed to exist as an almost perfect time capsule of itself, separated from the temporal nature of the rest of the world.

Table Manners was a play on the phenomenon, whereby plastic or ‘fake’ food was, to me, emblematic of this perceptual framework. Like a memory, they’re inherently ‘other’, understood as artificial preservations of something organic and all too perishable. Our dealings with these stand-ins are familiar, uncanny, distant, and finally illusory. Form is preserved; touch, taste and smell are absent, supplied only by prior association.