Counting the Tanks uses archival badges and medals from the GDR, including FDJ and Pioneer badges and military medals. These objects were once part of systems of education, ritual and reward. I return to them as physical remnants and explore what happens when their original context is altered.

The badges and medals are embedded in ash and photographic emulsion. The ash is made from burned contemporary military-themed media and toy packaging, bringing another material layer into contact with the historical objects. The objects remain present within the material, but their surfaces, forms and original functions become partially obscured.

Close-up photographs of the badges and medals flatten the different objects to the same scale. Removed from the systems in which they once operated, they become photographic forms as much as symbols. Their differences in size and status are reduced, allowing the physical qualities of the objects to come to the foreground.

Some of the artefacts are also embedded in slabs of air-dry clay. Others are represented through the imprint they leave behind, so that the object is either partially visible or present only through the trace of its former position. The slabs are displayed together on a 100 cm-long white shelf.

The work is concerned with what remains when objects that once carried meaning are removed from their original setting. Rather than reproducing or simply preserving them, I alter their physical conditions while keeping the original objects present. Ash, emulsion and clay become ways of enclosing, obscuring and recording them.

The historical meaning of the badges and medals remains part of the work, but the process is driven by a material question: how can an object be transformed without being lost? What remains visible, what becomes hidden, and what can survive as a trace?

12 prints, 60 × 40 cm
12 slabs, displayed on a white shelf, 16 × 100 cm