Surface Tension (In Blue & White)

These photographs connect to fragments of memory. The unrelated objects together activate powerful memories, loss, belonging and desire.

The images all connect to moments of involuntary memory, they trigger a response to something from the past, heightening a sense of loss, an ephemeral disappearance. My photographs invoke questions and I experiment with subject matter and process.

The theme, I Don't Know How To Respond To That, supports my work and my process, the experimental nature of combining a mixture of techniques into one body of work, the differing scale of the images, and the difficult nature of how to respond to grief, there is not one answer, we have deep raw feelings that need not be understood or defined, but felt and explored.

My images and the process of making has helped me to navigate my way through loss. Being in the darkroom making photograms was a form of therapy, holding precious objects and moving them about in the dark and watching their image form in the chemistry. Using the scanner while labelling objects to sell or give away. Floating my mother’s clothes in the Mediterranean sea and filming the shapes underwater, creating Still life scenarios with both important objects and the often overlooked insignificant things from her house. All the objects belonged to my mother, and I have them and can’t throw or give them away.

This series is an ongoing body of work, using a variety of processes, scanning, cyanotypes, film, digital and photograms. Each process represents my journey through photography while exploring the relationship between mother and daughter and the intersection between of both women.

My work has always been about the process of involuntary memory – being transported to an old memory by a smell or vision of something already seen or experienced. My physical side effects of grief were that I began to grind my teeth during sleep. A few months after Mum died I cracked a bottom tooth on the left side and in quick succession, cracked one on the right side. I make the photographs to explore the psychological effects of losing a parent and coming to terms with having to find my own answers. Asking for the answer by phone or text goes nowhere, only back to me, I will never know the actual answer, I will have to guess or assume, so my security is now in question.

The colour palette in the photographs is in response to my mother’s collection of blue & white china and the blue of the sea and the sky where her ashes still dance. The rich colour evokes warmth and act as buffers between the colourless images of melancholy between absence and presence.

These are just a few images from this work made over 4 years. Some are cyanotypes at A2 size and some are yet to be printed. If this work is selected I'm happy to make the work within a space to install, an installation.