Other Mothers, more than my previous work, demands text as an accompaniment. Each relationship is a micro-story which an a photograph or a photographed projected image of a photograph cannot, by itself, tell. My tutor Cemre was the first to suggest strongly that was the project in which text would strongly support the overall effort. […]
Read more
“Put crudely,” say Jo Spence and Rosy Martin, “reframing is a kind of internal permission-giving to change, review, to let go and to move on. “It is not a way of discovering the ‘real’ to see if it is ‘biased’ but of finding new ways of perceiving the past so that we can change our […]
Read more
This module is proving very challenging in terms of project work. All of the contextual material – from Jo Spence to Maria Kapajeva – is fascinating but none is gripping me as overly relevant to my own work. I find myself as admiring their output from afar, on its own terms, without that sense of […]
Read more
I’m fascinated by the work of Caroline Furneaux, especially The Mothers I Might Have Had. Furneaux’s project stems from found images of her father’s previous (before her mother) girlfriends and is a whistle stop tour of fantasy and imaginings sprinkled with a healthy dash of voyeurism and play. Her gaze across the images is playful […]
Read more
I love narrative, I love story-telling. But in my current project Other Mothers I am facing a fresh challenge: A newly formed archive of atomised images drawn from other archives (family albums) both from within my own family and from outside. Each ‘mother’ has a file, in which potentially suitable images for project work are […]
Read more
Photographs, says Annette Kuhn in Family Secrets, are “evidence”. “Not that they are to be taken only at face value,” says Kuhn, “nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evident relationship between itself and what it shows. “Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation – evidence in […]
Read more
I’ve begun an excavation of sorts. The ground to be dug is a growing mound of images from family albums, including my own. The work is part of a project with the working title ‘Other Mothers’ in which I’m attempting to…(honour? Declare love?) I’m not quite sure yet, but something, towards those incredible women from my […]
Read more
Towards the end of the previous Sustainable Prospects module I had the growing impulse that the next stage of evolving my project lay in my ‘other mothers’. I want to explore my relationships with those incredible women in my life who, following my abandonment by own biological mother, have loved me, nurtured me and deeply […]
Read more