Mishal Weston's practice zooms into the particular and peculiar aspects of the everyday, particularly that which is discarded and left for decay. Yet, Weston tends to these mundane objects as sacred relics, each offered loving wit(h)ness. By leveraging an office or photo scanner as their lens + assemblage + cyanotype, Weston surfaces the intricate details and textures of mundane items, inviting viewers to see the world through a care(full) gaze. From seashells to seeds, bones, bottle caps, feathers and detritus of the modern world, there’s nothing Weston doesn’t find excluded in the gift of their attention.

Weston’s work is a love letter to the excluded or discarded, to anything or anyone who has been cast aside or misunderstood. The generosity of Weston’s capacity to wit(h)ness goes beyond most artists, where the scattered remnants of daily existence are tended to with reverence. Part mortician, part archivist, part archaeologist, part alchemist, the care imbued in Weston’s tender cradling of fragments in passing, as kairos anoints its discovery, then catalogued in vigil scans. Some works covering entire year catalogues of noticing and gifting their attention. Rather than clocks or calendars, Weston iteratively sculpts with time, with almost empirical specificity, or what Goethe called “delicate empiricism”.

Initially driven by feelings of disconnection and monotony, Weston found solace and inspiration in their unique artistic process. Through their scans, they not only reclaim the beauty in the discarded but also prompt a deeper contemplative enquiry into our relationship with the matter of the world, or what Queer Quantum physicist Karen Barad refers to as “space-time matterings”. Barad challenges traditional understandings of space, time, and matter as separate and distinct entities, and rather proposes a view of the universe in which these elements are inseparable and entangled in a dynamic web of relations. Weston’s catalogues resonate with these distinct yet entangled webs of relations. “People are so disconnected from each other,” Weston says. “We often overlook the simplest things that can bring us together” They go on to say, that this practice of artistic contemplative enquiry and wit(h)nessing has: “changed the way that I perceive the world, the way that I go about each day,” From this perspective, and careful gifting of their attention Weston muses: “Anything can be art if you change your perspective”.