Dainesha Nugent-Palache’s photography-based practice is concerned with visualizations of Black diaspora across pasts, presents, and speculative futures. Dainesha’s investigations into the various facets of presented and perceived identities have been exhibited through her portraiture and more recently created body of still-life based works.
Through still-life, Dainesha explores how interaction with apparently ordinary objects, plants and other household items informs her daily life experiences. Her 2022 Smokestack Quarterly spring issue, “Enduring Ephemeral (the last bouquet)” exemplifies this new direction of her practice. In response to the subject portrayed in this work, she writes:
The last remaining flowers from my garden before all the colour starts to fade—a vibrancy that’s perennial and also cruel.
Not long before the first frost hits, grounds grow dormant spirits dim.
If it’s not possible to suspend a moment let it be memorialized while becoming vapour.
