REVIEW May 2025 Holding Fragility: Reflections on Naomi Kendrick’s ‘Fragments of Time’

Harpreet Kaur

Speaker, writer and researcher Harpreet Kaur visits Salford Museum & Art Gallery, where four women artists collaborate on ‘Fragments of Time’, an exhibition which gathers together work based on themes of fragility, place and change. Lizzie King employs analogue and digital forms of photography and sound to engage the audience, bringing them closer to other species and highlighting links between the environment, places and their inhabitants. Maggie Thompson explores place, absence and transience, often beginning with photographic images in her organically unfolding printmaking processes. Susan Wright makes use of a range of printmaking techniques including etching, monotype and photolithography with an almost archaeological examination of structures, maps and landscapes. However, here, Kaur focuses on the delicate drawing based sculptural works of Naomi Kendrick, with a movingly personal review of her section of the exhibition.

Salford Museum & Art Gallery, Fragments of Time: Naomi Kendrick, Lizzie King, Maggie Thompson, Susan Wright. https://salfordmuseum.com/event/fragments24/ Visit for free until 21 December 2025

Artist Talk Saturday 28 June 1-2pm, free, no booking required https://salfordmuseum.com/event/talk-fragments25/

There are times when art meets you exactly where you are. When it offers not just something to look at, but something to feel — to help make sense of your own shifting world. Visiting ‘Fragments of Time’ at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, I found myself seeking precisely this kind of connection.

As a resident of Salford in Greater Manchester, I am lucky to have a multitude of cultural offerings to enjoy and explore on my doorstep. I made a return visit to Salford Museum and Art Gallery recently, drawn by the title and description of one of their current exhibitions. ‘Fragments of Time’ features work by four female artists brought together through their exploration of fragility, place, and change.

As a woman navigating the challenges and opportunities of mid-life, this immediately caught my attention. On closer examination, it appeared that the artists were all white and perhaps a little older than me, though I couldn’t be certain. Still, I was curious. Just because an artist may share aspects of my identity doesn't guarantee we share the same lived experiences — and similarly, artists different from me can offer profound points of connection. We are wired to connect through shared emotions and reflections. One artist’s focus on parental ageing and mortality drew me in further. With my mother now in her 70s, recently suffering a fall that accelerated her dementia and mobility issues, I wondered if this exhibition might help me process these difficult but inevitable stages of life.

There are many different reasons why people end up in a gallery. You could be a first-time visitor wondering what you might find, you may have heard good things about the café, followed a recommendation, stumbled in as a tourist — or, as in my case, been drawn by a very specific emotional need. Arriving with such personal expectations can feel risky, but it also creates a different kind of engagement — one that is deeper, more urgent.

I headed straight to Naomi Kendrick’s section in the East Wing, visually captivated by her installation: huge gunnera leaves, grown by Kendrick’s father, enclosed and suspended in a large glass case. Each leaf is distinct, painted with layers of ink and enamel, their surfaces textured and luminous, fragile yet bold. The piece Nothing Gold Can Stay (2022-23) visually expresses Kendrick’s reflections on mortality and the inevitability of change, capturing both the urge to preserve life and the reality of its ephemerality.

Kendrick describes her creative process as “married to meaning; the violent euphoria of being enveloped in sound, scratched out in charcoal on a sea of cartridge; a quiet exploration of parental ageing with giant dried gunnera leaves and delicate ink poised on the tip of the tiniest brush; seeking strength in the fragilities of the world around us, painstakingly capturing and holding fragments of matter between tissue.”

Hours later, I found myself discussing the work with Kendrick, sharing how it resonated with my own life. Lately, I have stopped deleting voice messages from my mother, preserving her words, her voice, as if I can somehow freeze time against the inevitable loss. Kendrick told me about noticing her father’s ageing body — his papery skin reminding her of the fragile gunnera leaves he tended in his garden. Life offering us visual metaphors we are not always ready to see.

In reflecting on these conversations, I realise that grief often begins long before a loss is official. Dementia blurs those lines further. My mother's vivid stories of her youth in India, so rich and full of colour, are like windows into a world that is slipping away. Listening to her recount memories of village life, of childhood rituals, I feel an aching privilege. It is both precious and painful to witness her clinging to these memories while losing her hold on the present.

I am also aware that part of my readiness to connect with Kendrick’s work comes from already having lived through loss. My father passed away nearly two decades ago, after years of illness that began when I was just a child. I remember how he would ask me and my siblings to massage his aching legs — small acts of care that, at the time, I often regarded with impatience, too young to comprehend their gravity. His bruised, battered skin perplexed and scared me. Now, in hindsight, I see it as the visible language of his long struggle, a language I was too young to read then. Kendrick's reflections stirred in me a deep compassion — for my father, for my younger self, and for the difficult, messy ways in which we come to understand mortality.

Returning to Kendrick's work, I think again about the gunnera leaves. In their enclosed cases, they seem suspended between worlds — not fully living, not fully gone. The red enamel tracing the veins of one leaf gives it the illusion of movement, of energy — suspended in motion. Kendrick describes this piece as representing resilience and strength, the idea that ageing is not simply decline, but also a testimony to everything one has endured, achieved, and fought for across a lifetime.

Nearby, another leaf lies curled and still, its surface treated with silver and white ink, suggesting stillness, finality, perhaps even peace. It appears frozen, a poignant contrast to the vibrant, airborne leaf. And then there is the gold-leafed form — rich, precious, luminous. It speaks to preservation, memory, the human impulse to hold onto what matters most.

Alongside these sculptural works, Kendrick presents another deeply moving work, Untitled (2022) — a large, intricate drawing made from a single sheet of tissue paper. Created during the constraints of lockdown, the piece emerged slowly, shaped by moments stolen between parenting and working. Initially crumpling and twisting the fragile tissue, Kendrick then traced the accidental folds with a tiny brush and ink, following their paths: a cartographer of vulnerability.

The resulting work reads like a map of the human condition — fragile yet enduring, accidental yet intentional. Its networks of veins and creases evoke natural phenomena: fungal mycelium, jellyfish tendrils, ancient topographies. Kendrick discovered that, paradoxically, the ink strengthens the fragile tissue, much in the way scars reinforce the body after injury.

Kendrick’s fascination with “fault lines” — the geological term for points of fracture — underpins this work. Just as the earth’s crust breaks and shifts under pressure, so too do our internal landscapes, marked by stress, loss, and survival. Her work embraces the cracks, tracing them with care, revealing that strength is not the absence of vulnerability, but rather the conscious acceptance of it.

In the intimacy of Kendrick’s drawings and the monumental scale of her leaves, there is a clear thread: a deep reverence for the passage of time, for fragility, for the quiet acts of endurance that allow us to continue loving, creating, and being despite inevitable change.

Moving through the exhibition, another piece titled A Prayer (2025) deepens this meditation on fragility and care. Kendrick created this work from a single giant gunnera leaf, originally gifted to her by her father during a family holiday in Cornwall. Initially vibrant and green, the leaf dried over time into a brittle, delicate form — its transformation capturing the passage of time.

When first making the piece, Kendrick described hauling a massive sheet of MDF into her studio, wrestling with scale and light to realise her vision. The final structure, displayed upright with light behind it, reveals the fragility and resilience of the material in equal measure. Yet beyond the technical challenges, A Prayer emerged from a deeply personal place. It was sparked by Kendrick’s maternal fear for her young son, triggered by troubling news stories about conscription and global instability.

In an almost ritualistic process, Kendrick deliberately shattered the dried leaf, then painstakingly reassembled it using delicate sheets of Japanese tissue and adhesive. The act of smashing — then mending — mirrored her emotional instinct: to protect, to hold still the chaos and preserve what matters most. Along the edge of the work, a subtle line of gold ink traces the fractures, echoing the Japanese tradition of kintsugi — repairing broken objects with gold to honour their history, rather than hide it.

Though born from a specific maternal anxiety, Kendrick chose not to impose this narrative onto the exhibition label. Instead, she left A Prayer open for broader interpretation — allowing viewers to find their own connections to loss, vulnerability, and hope. The title suggests a universal offering: a wish for safety, a quiet defiance against fragility, and a testament to the strength found in holding what is broken, rather than discarding it. Kendrick’s work invites us to see beauty not despite life's fractures, but because of them — to honour what remains, even as it inevitably changes.                                                                                                                 

While preparing to visit the exhibition, I found myself wondering what I might have in common with these artists beyond the fact that they were women. Would their work — shaped by experiences and perspectives potentially very different from mine — still invoke something familiar, something that resonated within me? As it turned out, it did.

Though I do not know Naomi Kendrick’s full family history or life story, I am aware that our experiences of time and loss have unfolded along different paths. My parents migrated to Britain from India with little capital, working tirelessly to build a life with no sick days or safety nets until illness forced an end to that striving. My father's death, when I was young, meant I never witnessed the slow and gradual ageing process that Kendrick captures so tenderly. I also do not share the experience of motherhood, and at times, I feel a quiet gratitude for being spared the additional fears that come with bringing new life into an uncertain world.

Yet despite these differences, some truths bind us all: the passing of time, the inevitability of change, and the profound fragility woven through existence. Kendrick’s work does not leave me dwelling in despair, but instead inspires a quiet determination — a reminder that, like the golden leaf she so lovingly preserved, we each hold within us something precious. The invitation is to seize the fleeting time we have, to leave something meaningful behind, and to treasure the luminous possibilities still shimmering in our hands.