French Folds

French Folds is a project about accumulation. My work is about family & memory, and—here specifically—about how women fill their homes and lives with things.

French Folds is a project about accumulation. My work is about family & memory, and—here specifically—about how women fill their homes and lives with things.

 This series is an investigation into space: how special objects occupy space; and how their purpose shifts and becomes elevated because they have familial significance. Every corner is full of things that my mother gave to me or were hers. I have objects that I played with in my grandmother’s house. Letting go of objects is an impossibility and they jostle with existing memories. As we continue to live new experiences, time creates layers, shadows, reminiscences, stories recollected and retold; as the clear light casts across the objects during different seasons and times of day, I make hundreds of images of the objects.

 I often sequence my photographs into small hand-made books. Recently I started folding and making simple structures, I began to imagine a mountain landscape, and how I might evolve some of my own work into three-dimensional shapes that echo the play of light on these familiar yet specific surfaces on which many of our family objects now find themselves.

 I looked closely at the art of folding and, in learning origami forms, I experimented with repeated structure using my images. For this work I have juxtaposed the newly-constructed forms together with my original photographs and the depicted objects themselves to explore the layering and story-telling. There is a play between folded paper and folds of cloth, actual surface and the different materials represented in the photographs. This work represents a playful exploration of my preoccupation the way things look when they are photographed—the act of rendering visually, and indeed of rendering through three-dimensional structures into objects that themselves engage more acutely with the space they occupy.

 These images are initial test pieces. I am continuing to experiment with printing and folding on different papers at different sizes. For exhibition purposes the final photographs will be printed on Hahnemuhle photo rag to echo surface and materiality.