Margaret Lansink, BORDERS OF NOTHINGNESS – ON THE MEND, 2020

In the infinite flow of everything, people come and go in our lives. While the presence of some can be so subtle that we hardly register when it begins or ends, with others it’s far clearer: they enter, or leave, with a bang.

In Borders of Nothingness, Dutch photographer Margaret Lansink (b. 1961) dwells in the transitional ambiguity of her adult daughter’s decision to suspend contact with her, photographing landscapes and nude women whose disappearing presence raises the same haunted question: is this the moment you were gone?

As time passed, Lansink and her daughter reconnected to investigate whether their break could be mended. Lansink then began to revisit and reinterpret Borders of Nothingness in a physical practice that mirrored their emotional efforts of healing. Working from the Japanese practice of repairing ceramics with gold leaf, she combines her images, severs them, and mends their breaks with gold leaf to put hope into the possibility of a bond that is stronger and more beautiful because it had once been broken.

by Katherine Oktober Matthews