Indicative of Eva Nielsen’s persistent focus on abandoned infrastructures, secondary homes and photographic records, the layered imagery in “Chemical Milling (10)” takes its title from the process of chemical corrosion in reference to the incomplete, materially mediated yet active nature of memory and transmission. The central image of a waterfront home caught in a momentum of decay is locked inside a circular frame which comes to temporally and spatially distance the view as if we were invited to contemplate a long lost memory through the mediation of an archival document.

In echo of the silkscreen technique at the painting’s ground layer, an additional layer of fabric is stretched onto the canvas as a finishing touch. A technique that Nielsen has been developing since her 2021 LVMH Métiers d’Arts residency, the silk-screen printed organza adds a fine textile layer to the painting that speaks to the mediated and recomposed nature of vision and memory, while the print on leather add a topographic quality to the work.