Wander Lines

Made during a 6-week period visiting my grandmother in Sweden for the first time in 5 years, Wander Lines explores the uncanny encounter of the familiar as it has been made strange through the separation of time.

Here, in the town my mother grew up and my grandmother grows old, the everyday is transmogrified through the strange parallelism of a life that has only ever partly been mine. Drawing on personal and cultural narratives around family, history, tradition, and mythology the work plays on the epistemological and ontological uncertainty of the image as a way of generating novel gestures that hint at these tensions between the familiar and the unknown.

As Tim Carpenter lovingly elucidates in his book-length essay To Photograph is to Learn How to Die (2022) photography, as a meaning-making device, allows us the possibility of assuaging (however provisionally) this incomprehensibility that exists between the self and the non-self, the real and the ineffable. For me, images form part of this sense making process, of drawing and re-drawing lines in-between points with the hope that we might reveal something about ourselves and the world. By documenting my mother, grandmother, and myself I attempt to construct meaning through absence, building upon the ever-stretching gossamers of memory that cling clumsily to the people and places we might call home.