YASMEEN KHAN

vignette /noun/

a brief evocative description, account, or episode

a small illustration which fades into its background without a definite border

a small ornamental design filling a space in a book or carving, typically based on foliage

 

A vignette is like a little window, a glimpse into a scene through a decorated frame. You know that on the other side, the picture extends in all directions, but you can only see what the frame allows; you must fill in the rest for yourself.

 

This is how I like to tell stories and make images.

 

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To tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns...

All stories are, more or less, ghost stories. (Julian Wolfreys)

 

To form an image is always to shape ghosts, to create an impression or a reception of something else. A printed image, like a ghost, is an impression of something else that was lost in the making of its spectre. Art and fiction are always spectral, hauntological, neither dead nor alive.

 

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Like all stories, my vignettes are ghost stories, about the ways in which an idealised version of the past haunts our presence and our reality.