In Things Through Now and Then: Hauntologies of an Asemic Materialism, Jonathan Boyd showcases 16 new works of jewellery alongside a series of media installations across moving image and published prose and text. Informed by philosophy, social and cultural histories and theories and fine art methodologies, these artworks were developed through formats of asemic inscription (signs and symbols that resist semantic reading), where meaning is inked, marked and scored through embodied and gestural processes, where meaning carries the weight of its own materiality.

Made from vitrified porcelain, many of the objects use the fictioning is a titletioning and aesthetics of the museum artefact, armatured things that exist in the here and now but exemplify the ever-presentness of the past as sites for exploring how meaning is always immanent, things carry the trace of meanings, where languages evolve and adapt with temporal fluidity and material forms preserve traces of absent histories, unrealised futures, and lost meanings, resisting totalising interpretations. Things Through Now and Then: Hauntologies of an Asemic Materialism names an inquiry into how matter functions as an unreadable palimpsest, one dense with inscriptions, affects, and memories that haunt the present without ever becoming fully legible. All dead languages carry an asemic trace where intention and interpretation hold in a contronymic fold (contronymy: a state where opposites can mean the same without contradiction); “what was meant” or “what some-thing means” is important and simultaneously unimportant: within the strange relics of an asemic materialism something affects, clings, touches, matters…