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Suede is a fabric that blushes. When nudged or pricked it seems to stain from within, its flecked surface fledging into bloom. As a child, I liked to rub the sleeve of my grandmother’s tan suede coat up and down as we sat waiting at the bus stop, watching it turn pale then dark then back again. This feeling I remember in my finger, the soothing idleness of how the fabric refused to settle on one colour or another.

A feeling I also remember in my finger: how, in little jabs and strokes, I read the news this morning, in bed on my phone while the sunlight shortened shadows through the window. There is rarely the crackling laundry-fold of a newspaper now, but I am wrong to think the experience disembodied. The surface of my phone, afterward, records the smudges of my reading; these imprints are as tangible as the news I read. Imprints on suede become a way of returning to a coat my grandmother’s arms no longer fill.

Poppy Jones prints images onto suede, yet her images seem to blush from within. Her prints teeter on thresholds: between photography and painting, between surface and stain, between light and shadow. Printmaking is, itself, a threshold between an image and its opposite, between a memory and its impression. Jones imprints into these antitheses. In Solid Objects, a glass decanter is anything but: it melts into the sultry background. Jones’s objects appear not pinned down but instead slip on the suede, their edges blurring like the soft makeup in 1980s films. A lemon is nostalgic, a tulip anachronistic, when their outlines are indefinite. They refuse today’s sharp resolution but instead seem to float continuously between then and now, in the corner of my vision. It is hard to know if this is Jones’s memory or mine, yesterday or ten years ago.

Jones captures her images to remember a fleeting moment, and reveals how we form ourselves through the banal quotidian. How it felt to be there then. Her suede is a memory in itself, cut from old clothing, a record of skin having covered skin. Skin is another threshold between our interior and the world, and inscribes time in freckles and wrinkles, scars and blemishes. In Quartet, three objects that can be peeled rest on a tablecloth beside a glass of water: an egg, a tangerine, a lemon. The skin of the tangerine puckers under a light source. This could be a 17th-century allegorical painting by Zurbarán, or yesterday’s breakfast. It could be named for T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which cycles through the trappings of time, or Jean Rhys’s novel where the protagonist, Marya Zelli, drifts unreal through 1920s Paris. In their ubiquitous privacy, Jones’s still-lifes testify to the repetition of living: the boiling of an egg, the filling of a glass, the light raking through the window there at that time of morning.

In pressing the dust of light and the maw of shadow, Jones encases her objects as if in crystal or resin. Lodged between things and their imprints is the largeness of these small gestures, the fact that this is where life gets lived, in the smudges and fingerprints, in comestible evanescence, in the mottled habits of sunlight and the blush of suede.

Phoebe Cripps is a writer, critic and curator. Her work has appeared in Frieze, Art Monthly, ArtReview, Flash Art, TLS and Vittles, amongst others. She is currently Associate Curator at the Warburg Institute in London, and lives in St Leonards-on-Sea.