The eraser as material: removal and absence

An eraser is usually imagined as an instrument of disappearance: push it across a line and the line becomes less legible. Yet the eraser cannot remove without changing something. It gathers graphite and fibre into crumbs, dulls the paper, leaves a pale rectangle and makes a small archive of pressure. Read as material rather than tool, it holds the physical evidence of a decision to withdraw, correct or conceal. That tension between loss and residue anchors Alexandra Mawimbi’s work across sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation.

Through the eraser as material, absence becomes something produced by contact, duration, sound, light and the body of a viewer. Mawimbi’s interest in representation, mourning and living presence therefore shifts attention from what is shown to what has been displaced around it. The erased mark can function like a memorial, a missing page or a voice interrupted mid-sentence. Its force comes from making removal visible without treating disappearance as a clean conclusion.

Erasure begins before the mark

Rubber, graphite and PVC—the ordinary construction of many pencil erasers—already suggest a material story. Friction is the mechanism by which correction happens. The eraser does not cover the old line; it thins it, disperses it and leaves the sheet altered. In a drawing, a polished passage can therefore carry as much information as a drawn one. It records an earlier movement and the authority involved in deciding that the movement should stop.

Everyday Australian habits sharpen this meaning. A whiteboard eraser restores a classroom for the next lesson; a rubber removes a wrong date from a returned form; a student closes a pencil case with a small block of rubber beside the sharpened pencils. These inexpensive objects are stocked beside notebooks and print paper in campus bookstores, newsstands and national office-supply chains. Their ordinariness matters. Erasure belongs to institutional life, where mistakes are corrected quickly so that another version can proceed.

Mawimbi’s practice makes that procedure aesthetic and unstable. Rather than preserving the authority of a clean surface, it attends to the crumbs, smudges and compressed zones that resist neat recovery. The viewer is asked to notice a material afterlife: what removal could not take. In this sense, the eraser becomes less a passive accessory than an active participant in representation, capable of exposing the labor and power contained in the wish to erase.

Traces, surfaces and occupied space

Sculpture gives this process volume. A rubbed block, a wall carrying a horizontal interruption or a floor bearing the trace of an absent body can make subtraction occupy space. The work may look quiet, yet its quiet is generated through acts of pressure, abrasion and placement. Mawimbi’s sculptural language allows the removed area to operate almost like a missing limb or a cut-out silhouette. The imagination supplies what the object withholds.

Two-dimensional works make the same proposition through surface. White may be a ground, a refusal or a reserve where another image once stood. In palimpsest-like passages, faint contours survive beneath later revisions. Such layering resists the idea that an image is fixed by a single authorial intention. It becomes an archive of competing decisions, each partly concealed and partly legible. Looking closely means shifting from recognition to material attention.

Installation extends the operation from object to room. Light may expose a surface that disappears when the source is switched off; a sound may make a wall seem newly vacant; a performance may leave only a slight displacement of dust. In Melbourne’s converted warehouses and compact city studios, or in Sydney’s former industrial sites, such work is especially alert to the meeting of fragile materials with architecture. A scratch is not merely damage. It is the site where site and action become inseparable.

Mourning as an active material

Mourning gives erasure a temporal charge. An absent portrait, interrupted sound or erased inscription does not settle grief; it marks the point at which loss becomes visible to others. The material remnant may be small—a thumbprint thinned to almost nothing, a rectangle of paper left clean, a recorded breath followed by silence—but scale does not diminish its force. It asks the viewer to register an encounter with someone no longer fully available.

This is where representation and living presence meet. A trace can preserve the fact of a former touch while refusing a complete likeness. Video and performance sharpen that paradox because the body appears and withdraws within real time. Mawimbi’s concern is not the preservation of an image against disappearance. It is the creation of conditions in which viewers sense that a presence has been affected, separated or withheld, and that their looking is part of that event.

Public memory in Australia offers a familiar field for these questions. Memorial plaques, commemorative flowers, ribbons and temporary street-side notices turn absence into a shared arrangement across parks and civic spaces from Melbourne to Brisbane. Such objects rarely represent mourning as one stable symbol. They accumulate, weather and are replaced. Their changing condition demonstrates how grief can remain materially active in a city, even as official language seeks to fix what a commemoration means.

Duration, sound and disappearing bodies

Moving image and sound can make absence temporal rather than spatial. A blank frame need not be a pause between pictures; it can become the picture’s central event. Similarly, a rubbed surface in a recording can carry more tension than the voice around it. These choices resist the expectation that media should deliver continuous information. They make waiting part of the encounter, allowing a viewer or listener to inhabit the interval in which an image or person recedes.

Sound makes erasure particularly physical. Friction, breathing, the drag of a sleeve or the settling of equipment can reveal a gesture before its visual consequence is understood. Mawimbi’s use of sound and performance places attention on embodied duration: a body is present only while the event unfolds, and documentation arrives afterward as a substitute that cannot restore the original encounter. The work lives in this gap between event, witness and record.

Material conditions in Australia make the fragility more than metaphor. High humidity and heat in Brisbane or Darwin can soften rubber, encourage adhesives to move and affect projection surfaces. Air-conditioning systems add a familiar mechanical layer to gallery sound, masking and exposing small noises in turn. Climate therefore enters the work as an active collaborator. A trace kept through one summer may not survive the next, making impermanence a local material fact rather than an abstract idea.

Removal, copyright and cultural authority

The digital archive adds another tension. Removing an image from a website may alter public access without transferring or extinguishing copyright in the underlying work. Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 generally leaves creators with control over reproduction, while artists’ resale and exhibition arrangements are commonly handled through consignment agreements with commercial galleries. The physical object may change hands; permission to reproduce it does not automatically follow. Absence on a screen and absence in law are different conditions.

Attribution and integrity protections also vary by medium. Statutory moral rights are especially significant for authors of photographs, films, sound recordings and publications, while performers can have separate rights in recorded performances. For Mawimbi’s combination of video, sound and performance, documentation should therefore be treated as an ethical as well as technical act. Credit is not a decorative caption. It records relationships among maker, performer, institution, audience and the rights needed for a work to circulate.

Removal becomes more complicated when images touch cultural knowledge and Indigenous intellectual property. Australian protocols for Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property stress consultation, consent and appropriate attribution, especially where communities recognise authority over cultural material. A practice about disappearance can still cause harm if it takes a motif, story or restricted image and presents that knowledge as freely available. Responsible erasure must identify what may vanish, what must remain and who has standing to decide.

Viewing erasure with care

Viewing erasure rewards a slower set of habits. Rather than asking only what an artwork depicts, notice how it withholds, what material survives and how duration changes the scene. These recommendations suit exhibitions, collections and online portfolios, where the pressure to reproduce every detail can flatten exactly the ambiguity the work holds.

Begin with Alexandra Mawimbi’s selected works and documentation to encounter the shifting traces created across sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation. Follow the exhibition and news pages for opportunities to encounter the work in person, and contact Alexandra Mawimbi through the site’s contact details to discuss a viewing, commission or collaboration.