Footprints emerged in 2022, during a period of mourning following the death of my father. The first version of the work began with me wearing my father's sandals and leaving footprints in mud. I later repeated this action in snow. As the traces gradually disappeared, the work became a kind of performance and, at the same time, a negative sculpture: rather than representing the body directly, it focused on the space and trace left behind by it.

The footprints are arranged in a cross-shaped formation, each line consisting of six footsteps. This repetition and geometric structure developed through my research into graves and kurgans. I became interested in the relationship between the six-foot depth at which a human body is commonly buried and the six-head proportion used to measure the body in Ancient Greek sculpture. The way a single measurement appears both in the idealised representation of the living body and in its place beneath the ground became one of the starting points of Footprints. Rather than directly representing the depth of a grave, the work attempts to bring this depth back to the surface through repeated bodily movement.

The fact that the footprints in the snow eventually melted away also became part of the work. What remained was not a permanent object, but a temporary trace of a body, an action and a particular moment. Footprints was an early starting point in my practice for thinking about the relationship between mourning, the body, repetition, measurement and disappearance—questions that I continue to return to in my work.