This ongoing still-life photography series documents objects found within Amato’s family home in Melbourne, where her mother has lived since 1974 and continues to reside as she approaches ninety. Returning annually to care for and spend time with her mother, Amato turns her attention away from the body and toward the domestic objects that have silently witnessed decades of family life. Some remain exactly where they were placed in her childhood; others sit broken but intact, preserved by her mother’s refusal to discard anything to which memory has attached itself.

The work considers material culture as an emotional archive. Each object carries personal significance disproportionate to its material value, transforming everyday household items into repositories of care, loss, and endurance. Amato is interested in the looming question faced by many in her generation: what happens to a lifetime of accumulated belongings when a life ends, and how does one inherit not only objects, but the emotional weight embedded within them?

The photographs are made daily during her current visit, staged on a table in the backyard using natural morning light. Organic matter harvested from her mother’s garden that same day—flowers, fruit, vegetables—is incorporated into each composition, introducing temporality, decay, and care into the frame. This ritualized process becomes an act of quiet witnessing: a way to slow time, to archive what is at risk of disappearing, and to honor the domestic space as a site of memory, labor, and unresolved attachment.