by Eve Rogers, studio photos by Ryan Molnar // Aug. 17, 2026
On a red steel shelf in Lucinda Dayhew’s studio, a single platform Mary Jane from Miu Miu’s Spring/Summer 2017 collection takes pride of place. As though displayed on a mantelpiece or locked away in a trophy cabinet, it appears straight out of a fairytale even before she discloses that she had to have it, despite its being too small to wear. Around it, neighbouring artefacts include a midi keyboard, golden eggs, countless photographs and drum cymbals, each serving as clues to the treasure hunt we’re about to embark upon, as Dayhew prepares to guide us through her labyrinthine research process.
The opposite wall is peppered with lists of words coupled together, some lifted from John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’—which famously introduced terms including sensuous, pandemonium and love-lorn to the vernacular—and others from Australian convict slang recorded by James Hardy Vaux in 1819. The pairing is characteristic of Dayhew’s practice, in which cultural hierarchies become porous through proximity. Milton’s epic poem and a convict’s slang dictionary belong to very different traditions, yet both demonstrate language as a harbinger of invention, mutation and movement.
The studio itself is part playground, part archive, seemingly assembled by someone who distrusts filing systems, or perhaps a cryptographer getting close to cracking a complex cipher: an object leads to a word, a word to a book, a book to an ancestor, an ancestor to a ship that crossed the globe more than two centuries ago. This associative logic underpins ‘Leather Lane Flesh Bag,’ Dayhew’s forthcoming exhibition at Kinderhook & Caracas, where the gallery’s shopfront space becomes the apartment of Aurelia Perla, a fictional photographer living in a not-too-distant future Kreuzberg.
A climate-induced tsunami has flooded the city, leaving Aurelia’s home abandoned, her possessions preserved in the aftermath like a private would-be Pompeii. The apartment is transformed into a museum of Aurelia’s life and Dayhew’s years of investigation into migration, ancestry, language and rhythm. Her instinct, it seems, is less to fall down a rabbit hole when researching than to dive in deliberately, swimming all the way to the ocean floor, pulling a single thread and pursuing it with rigor wherever it leads.
Aurelia’s name is one such thread, a reimagining of Dayhew’s own middle name. The character’s fictional genealogy is entangled with her own, too. Dayhew traces one branch of her family to Ann Forbes, her six-times-great-grandmother, who was 15 when she was arrested in London for stealing a bolt of cotton, sentenced to death, reprieved and transported to Australia with the First Fleet in 1787. The story reached Dayhew, almost in passing, from her father shortly before his death—one loose seam in a much larger fabric she has spent years since trying to trace, leading her to an online group of Forbes’ descendants scattered across the world, all following the branches of a family tree two and a half centuries deep.
The geographical details of this inheritance seem as pertinent to the work as its historical ones. Dayhew lived for years in the same part of London that, according to parish records, Forbes must have inhabited before her arrest, within a few kilometres of London Bridge and Borough, only discovering the connection after she had left. It is the sort of coincidence that makes fate difficult to dismiss, and one of many that Dayhew has accumulated. She tells us about Dinoj, a young man she once ran music workshops with in Sri Lanka, who happened to be born on the same day as her and whose mother carried him out of the path of the 2004 tsunami as an infant. Dayhew, who has long had tsunami nightmares of her own, later photographed the cover of a photo album belonging to an elderly hotel owner she interviewed in Batticaloa about his experience of living through decades of civil war and the tsunami. An ex-horticulturalist, he had established his hotel in the 1960s on a sandy, disused coconut plantation, cultivating an extensive garden of native and introduced plants that he continued to tend through the years of conflict and disaster. Inside the album were his own photographs from that time, which Dayhew rephotographed, incorporating his private record of the past into the wider archive of her work.
Water begins to emerge as less a theme than a current running through her work, linking personal memory to family history and the fictional world of Aurelia. It also provides a bridge to Drexciya, the Detroit techno duo whose mythology imagines an underwater civilization descended from the unborn children of African women thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage. Dayhew has carried this mythology with her since her teen years in Sydney’s rave scene, and remains deeply inspired by its introduction of the concepts of speculative ancestry, oceanic histories and world-building as a method of processing intergenerational trauma.
These traces of migration are embedded in the battered copy of ‘Paradise Lost’ on Dayhew’s desk. So swollen and deteriorated that it could have been rescued from a shipwreck, it was the only memento she took from her grandmother’s house after she died. Originally drawn to Milton’s ideas around paradise and utopias rather than his coinages, Dayhew had been researching these themes when she came across the book among the many her great-grandfather had brought with him when he immigrated from Scotland to Australia in the late 19th century. It’s another migrant object, carried from one end of the globe to another before finding its way into Dayhew’s hands, and from there travelling onwards to Germany. It is then that I realize the long-sleeved mesh top Dayhew is wearing, composed of three different tartan patterns, is no coincidence either.
These journeys across oceans, generations, languages and forms seem to find their rhythm in Dayhew’s musical practice. An electronic drum kit is tucked into one corner of the studio; cymbals and mixers occupy almost every available surface, scattered with such strategic proximity that a beat might be summoned mid-sentence. Dayhew describes rhythm and loops as her way of making sense of the world: not so much repetition as recurrence, the return of something altered by the distance it has travelled. Her research seems to move according to the same logic. A detail can surface, disappear from view and return again, carrying the residue of everything it has encountered in the interim. Connections are trusted to disclose themselves, as though the work has its own internal timing, with no need whatsoever for a shoehorn. Everything finds its place in time—perhaps the shoe was never meant to be worn.
Photography gives this practice its most tangible form. Aurelia, Dayhew’s fictional photographer, summons questions of evidence and absence into the work, particularly through its nod to Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’ and its meditation on photographs as records of people and moments from the past. Aurelia’s own photographs will function the same way for a woman who never existed: convincing as evidence precisely because there is no original moment for them to fall short of. A well-thumbed copy rests on the shelf, and I must be catching on to this new language because this time I spy the connection: Lucida and Lucinda, both meaning “bright” or “illumination”—an apt quality for an artist whose vocation is to cast light on things and draw attention to details long-overlooked and obscured.
It occurs to me that this is as much a way of moving through the world as it is a body of work. A path exists here, legible only in retrospect, each point painstakingly plotted along the way, revealing its pattern only to those with the patience to keep walking it. Perhaps this is Dayhew’s version of fate: not something predetermined, but woven by one headstrong enough to keep pulling the thread. With a healthy appetite for the absurd, her work, though rigorous, resists reverence. Fact and fiction rub up against one another, leaving room for humor in the blur between them: a nudge in the narrative, a wink in the weave. Laughing, she wonders aloud whether it’s madness or research, and as the conversation nears its end, we muse over this as perhaps the rationale for choosing life as an artist: the irrevocable license to learn, to embrace curiosity and the evergreen excuse to move toward whatever comes to light. In her case, at least, the argument is watertight.
Artist Info
Exhibition Info
Kinderhook & Caracas
Lucinda Dayhew: ‘Leather Lane Flesh Bag’
Opening Reception: Saturday, Aug. 29; 6–10pm
Exhibition: Aug. 29–Oct. 3, 2026
instagram.com/kinderhookcaracas
Kreuzbergstraße 42E, 10965 Berlin, click here for map
