Blank currently exhibited for the Malta Biennale 2026 at the Ggantija Temples in Gozo, examines the exposed party walls that emerge across Malta when houses are demolished and replaced by new apartment blocks. These white surfaces, usually temporary yet visually striking, reveal the hidden outlines of former homes and the lives once contained within them.
Photographed with restraint and distance, the walls appear almost neutral. Yet they function as architectural indexes of absence. Their smooth surfaces carry the shadows of staircases, rooflines, and internal rooms that no longer exist, transforming ordinary urban spaces into quiet traces of erasure.
These walls are not simply by-products of construction. They mark moments of rupture within the urban fabric. As homes disappear and new developments rise beside them, the exposed surfaces become visible records of a form of spatial violence embedded within rapid urban transformation.
Rather than documenting demolition directly, Blank focuses on what remains after the act. The project observes how the built environment absorbs change, allowing these surfaces to stand as indexes of transition, memory, and loss within Malta’s evolving landscape.
In Place. Where the Land Holds is a photographic project developed through sustained engagement with sites where women were killed. The work does not attempt reconstruction, narration, or explanation. Rather than rendering violence visible or legible, it attends to the locations as they exist now: ordinary, accessible places that continue to function within everyday life, yet remain permanently marked by what occurred there.
The project is shaped through repeated visits over time. This return is central, allowing familiarity, change, and ordinariness to surface. The photographs do not isolate moments or seek decisive images; they remain with the present condition of each site. No bodies are shown, and no visual markers of violence are introduced. Absence is not treated as a lack to be filled, but as a condition that is held.
Within this framework, photography operates as a form of witnessing rather than evidence. The images do not point back to an event or attempt to stand in for it. Instead, they stay with what persists after the event has passed. In doing so, the work avoids forensic aesthetics, spectacle, and the consumption of trauma, framing the sites not as exceptional but as places that continue to be walked through, lived beside, and overlooked. Some have been altered or rebuilt entirely, further complicating the relationship between place, memory, and what is allowed to remain.
The project considers how violence is not only an event but something that settles into land and architecture, becoming absorbed into the built environment. Over time, this absorption renders trauma increasingly invisible, folded into surfaces that appear neutral and functional. In Place asks how landscapes hold these histories without declaring them, and how this quiet persistence shapes collective memory.
By working with restraint and repetition, the project creates space for reflection rather than resolution. It invites viewers to slow down and consider their own proximity to these sites, recognising how ordinariness and absence coexist with what cannot be undone.
This body of work emerged following engagement with a project titled ‘Don’t Air Your Dirty Laundry’, conceived by Lisa Gwen, which explores how violence against women can be exposed and brought into public awareness.
Assumed Safety explores environments that appear benign yet carry latent conditions of vulnerability. Moving across urban, industrial, and natural landscapes, the work focuses on spaces where visibility is fragmented, movement is uncertain, and spatial control is ambiguous. Rather than depicting events, the images examine how unease can be embedded within the structure of a place itself. The project forms part of an ongoing practice-based research into how landscapes reveal, conceal, or anticipate human experience.
Subtraction examines architecture through acts of removal, where absence operates as a spatial index of what has been extracted. The work focuses on sites where buildings have been partially or fully removed, exposing interiors and reconfiguring the relationship between façade, depth, and ground.
Rather than depicting demolition as spectacle, the images adopt a frontal and measured approach, allowing the void to emerge as a material and volumetric presence. What remains is not emptiness, but a reorganisation of space in which interiors become exterior, and boundaries are redefined through loss.
The project considers how urban environments are continuously edited through processes of extraction, leaving behind spaces that are neither complete nor resolved. These sites function as quiet evidence of transformation, where absence becomes legible and architectural continuity is interrupted.
Subtraction is an ongoing body of work.
Interim examines urban spaces held in a state of controlled transition, where architecture is neither fully present nor entirely removed. Through barriers, hoardings, and temporary structures, access is restricted and visibility is carefully managed, producing sites that are simultaneously concealed and partially revealed.
The work focuses on the conditions that emerge during processes of development, where past traces remain visible while future forms are anticipated but not yet realised. Painted surfaces, exposed walls, and construction materials coexist, creating layered temporalities within a single frame.
Rather than documenting construction, the images consider how these spaces are mediated, how they are seen, accessed, and understood through systems of control. The resulting sites are neither stable nor resolved, but held in an interim state where transformation is ongoing and incomplete.
Interim is an ongoing body of work.
Deferred examines architectural structures that remain incomplete, where construction has begun but resolution has not been achieved. These buildings occupy a suspended condition in which intention is evident, yet function is absent.
The work focuses on spaces that resist clear categorisation: neither active nor abandoned, neither finished nor in progress. Exposed frameworks, unsealed volumes, and halted developments reveal architectures that appear paused, as if awaiting a future that may not arrive.
Rather than documenting decay or construction, the images consider how time operates within the built environment—how certain structures become held in prolonged delay, detached from their intended purpose. In these sites, architecture persists without fulfilment, producing a quiet tension between potential and inertia.
Deferred is an ongoing body of work.
