My practice

My exhibition is a collection of personal works that explore the relationship between memory and photograph. As we grow older, repeatedly recalling our memories can cause certain aspects to distort. The memory no longer stays pure to the true event, becoming infiltrated by the knowledge we gain, and increasingly fractured.

I create fragmented imagery using family archive photographs and cyanotype, disfiguring and re-assembling these ‘memories.’ Through my practice I am able to capture this tension where positive and negative memories meet. By physically corrupting the photograph, I am able to blur the line between reality and the surreal. This corruption creates imagery that evokes uncertainty, pushing the viewer to question and assess the image in more detail, a routine many of us do when revisiting memories.

The show lies in between intimacy and disturbance, a space of uncertainty yet familiarity. My work falls into the surreal where we begin to understand the photograph is not as fixed as we perceived. I explore how we use photography as a method of remembering, relying on imagery to re-write memory, blurring the lines of truth. Through haptic making I am able to challenge ideas of photography and its stillness by merging it with our ever shifting memories. My exhibition contorts imagery into life, using cyanotype as a medium transferred onto fabrics, playing with shadow I create living image that demands interpretation.

My practice is deeply personal, I allow my work to spontaneously come together, whilst I direct which mediums and images are used. I allow my subconscious to become a guide in my making, never having a fully developed plan or expectation for each outcome. The result is therefore authentic to myself and a true representation of my ever shifting memory.

My Process

Through my art practice I have used a variety of mediums, finding my niche in cyanotype. This process uses a light sensitive substance coated on paper or fabric and a negative image that is then exposed using UV to create these distinctive blue images. My practice is rooted in exploring childhood, as it developed, I found I used my practice as a way of understanding my past. I repeatedly began to incorporate old family archive pictures, some from before I was born. This curiosity to make sense of a complex past, perhaps rooted in mixed heritage, allowed for me to begin my journey into exploring the complexities of memory and its correlation to photography.

Using cyanotype allows me to be playful in my practice, experimenting with different mediums, on paper and on a variety of fabrics. I have found that I return to fabric throughout my practice, perhaps as a subconscious lean into comfort as it allows me to be hands on with my work. Working haptically challenges me emotionally to produce work that is most authentic to myself as my work falls into the obscure, but I restrict myself from allowing it to collapse fully into horror.

Previous Works

Family Tree