Ruination and Regeneration in the artwork, Leftovers at the table (or, what we are left
with)

Abstract

This paper addresses the core question of this conference: “What if, instead of being adverse to the notion of decay, we engaged with it as a critical and creative methodology, a process, aesthetic and gesture that can reshape how value, memory, and care are understood? I consider this provocation with reference to my artwork, Leftovers at the table (or, what we are left with) (2025).One might read the work as mossy landscape, but beneath the moss ‘tablecloth’, lie remnants of a dinner party in a settler-colonial home. Dutch delftware, English bone china, glass- and silverware are scattered over a ‘Colonial-style’ dining room table. The mosses grow over the objects, concealing and obliterating them.These objects speak to the persistence of settler-colonial traditions, values, inheritances and generations. The Delft dinner plate, Royal Doulton teacup and cut-glass bowl become ‘storied matter’. Formulated through the material and visual language of the domestic, their stories are of ‘ruination’ – a verb Ann Laura Stoler i uses to describe the decay of imperial projects that persistently saturate the subsoil of the post-colony.These objects resonate as spectral traces of colonial violences that haunt not only domestic interiors, but individual and collective imaginations in post-colonies. They are what Stoler calls “Imperial debris”; “’what we are ‘left with’ … [the] remains [and] aftershocks of empire ... the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things”. These often imperceptible processes of decay take place ‘below the surface’ of human consciousness; they are colonial debris to which many remain inextricably bound. Yet, in the work, decay is refigured through growth of the new, as the vibrant mosses become part of a cyclical continuum of life, renewal and transformation.