Psychometry takes its title from a practice employed by psychics and mediums, whereby past events and personal histories are divined through physical contact with an object. 12 contemporary artists channel and manifest the intangible and invisible through their work. Molins’ presented a sumptuous dark image of her deceased mother’s shoelaces frozen in a moment of telekinetic suspension, which appeared as a portal to another world. She also worked with Rapidform at the RCA metamorphosing one of her mother’s shoes into a transparent butterfly like structure, a kind of spirit/soul.

These works came out of Deep Down Dark Horse made from forensic detritus and used to deal with grief, loss and mourning and to articulate the gift of grief and how mourning expands the capacity for understanding and love. This work is part of an older human tradition that Lewis Hyde discusses in his book The Gift. These shoes are my heirlooms, a threshold gift to help in my passage from one place to another. Given to me I transform them through artistic practice and pass them on.

“I want to leave traces of ‘the other’ rather than try to define it. It is in the process – that this ‘there-not-there’ is touched, the ‘absence animated’ ‘writing transforms the things seen into tissues and blood.’ My voice is my other. I write and you are not dead’. Helene Cixous. Coming to Writing.