As We Grow, What Remains? is a collage composed of many photographs, illustrations, ephemera, and textures recently collected and combined with their personal image archive from living in Kitchener-Waterloo region. The artwork, installed as a vinyl image on the exterior of Market Square, explores the sense of familiarity that artist collaboration The Observatory (Lucy Bilson and Nicole Beno) have collected in their minds and have come to represent their unique experience of their respective neighbourhoods. Ultimately, the graphic quality of their design calls on some of these collected landmarks that specifically make this region feel like home.  

Bilson and Beno are fascinated by the way the built environment, public spaces, visual ephemera, textures, and colours all make up the fabric of how a city becomes familiar to its inhabitants. These are often public things that resonate very personally, such as a specific texture on a building, a sign along a trail, or the smell of a bakery that wafts past a particular intersection. Viewers encountering the piece may come to ask themselves: what does it mean to belong in a city that is constantly changing?