This practice-led research attempts to understand how a significant home-place of the past can be contained within a displaced, site-sourced material, to reveal the shifting emotional burdens encountered within a protracted, careful carrying of place. An auto-ethnographic, haptic studio methodology is used to contextualise the sole viewpoint of a non-indigenous woman, living in contemporary post-colonial Australia. The ‘gentle labours’ of slow, repetitive bodily interactions with raw material, are used to examine how the intimacy of touch facilitates a gradual, emotional understanding of place attachment, separation and loss, through the re-visiting and re-filtering of memory fragments. Site-responsive installations and text-based artworks, are used to test and expand these intuitive studio processes, to reveal the shifting facets of ‘splitting place’, across vast distances and broad spans of time.