Beyond repurposing abandoned doors, Adair also casts doors from specific sites using pulp paper and hammered copper—materials rich with symbolic meaning. Paper has long served as humanity’s foremost medium for recording art, information, and history, enabling ideas to endure and travel. When portability is crucial for his project, Adair often employs paper doors. One such door accompanied him on a journey through Sicily to the city of Gela, enabling a pilgrimage to retrace his uncle’s wartime experiences during the Allied invasion of Sicily.

While paper’s portability is one of its greatest strengths, its fragility is also its chief vulnerability. Copper, by contrast weathers gradually, its surface undergoing a slow oxidation that speaks to the resilience and evolving nature of collective memory. By working in these contrasting materials, Adair highlights the tension between what endures and what gets lost. Just as stories can erode, they can also be recast, polished, and brought back into the light.