Noelle Herceg is an interdisciplinary artist, often operating somewhere between sculptor and printmaker. Her fear of familial memory loss has guided her explorations in the copy, the trace, and the ephemeral. In recent work, Jell-O is used as a main medium to contain her body’s leftovers, as well as other unseen and unknown histories and stories. 

Notes on my ghost archive

‍i
The milk is sour.
The egg salad is spoiled.
The cookies are stale, and bread has molded.
A creak of the fridge door spews its sour at your nose.
The rotten creeps into your mouth.
And the mold down your throat.
These impossible urges.
Keep the carton.
Pile up the sauces.
Hold on to the spinach, just one more day.
My habits hold hands with my ancestors’.
Stocked pantry goods eventually spoil. 
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ii
My work is both an archive and anarchive, known and unknown collections of my every day.

An archive: accumulations of swept dust, fallen hair, laundry lint. Gathered beads of sweat. These materials are previous self-portraits, documentations of history, time, and processes. Traces of my environment, my meals, and my body are mapped.

An anarchive: the histories and processes unseen. An infinite collection that can’t quite be contained. The evaporated sweat in the process of collecting it. The non-trackable debris when sweeping dust. The anarchive, or ghost archive, is an endless collection which is impossible to gather. My body holds constellations of others’ histories, influences, and intersections. The world passes through us and leaves no proof but ourselves. We secretly shift. Even down to a molecular level, our cells are being consistently replaced. We shed ourselves over and over. Over time. 
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iii
I am a ghost archive. Today, I consist of the people I met on my dog walk. The smells and taste of eggs I made for breakfast. The sound of music that’s reverberated from what I heard on my running playlist this morning, in the car two days ago on the way to the thrift store, from the live show I saw last weekend; the magnificent church balcony six years ago; the lullabies hummed to me by my mother. The smells of that fridge.

08 Tyler Stoll→