This series emerges from a walk steeped in nostalgia, inspired by W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. As I wandered through the countryside, I became aware of how memory is often assembled from fragments. Objects encountered along the way seemed to act as portals to the past: a fallen branch, splayed like an octopus, recalled childhood trips with my mother to the coast of southern China, while a leaf resembling an insect brought back memories of evening study sessions at secondary school. These photographs trace moments when the landscape unexpectedly opens onto remembrance.
Keni Li is a China-born photographer and researcher based in Glasgow, currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Glasgow. She holds an MSc in Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh.Her recent book chapter, “Reinventing Contemporary Exhibition Space: Novels, Domestic Space, and Cinematic Cartography,” appears in Exhibition Matters: Contemporary Displays and Exhibition-Making Practices (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026). Her solo exhibition Fluid Memory: Wings (Glasgow, 2026), held at SaltSpace Gallery and accompanied by an artist’s photobook.
