Marian Macken, Our Concealed Ballast

Our Concealed Ballast weaves together personal experiences with theories of time, within an architectural context, as a work of creative non‐fiction. It includes the themes of time, landscape, place, grief, loss, absence, art practice, the domestic and motherhood. Just over 20 years ago, my partner died when I was pregnant with our child. As an academic, the notion of time within architecture is a strong research focus of mine. The manuscript brings together these aspects of personal reflections with architectural moments. It is not a comprehensive, chronological story of ‘what happened’. Rather, it is a set of meditations and reflections on the existence and presence of an event and its legacy, intertwined with more universal or objective examples of time, as a way of arriving at a personal phenomenology of time.

Dr Marian Macken teaches in the School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, New Zealand. She trained in architecture, landscape architecture and visual art, receiving her doctorate from the University of Sydney. She researches through creative works, primarily focused on architectural drawing and temporality. Marian’s work has been acquired by various international public collections of artists’ books; she recently exhibited at Centre of Contemporary Art Christchurch, NZ.