Mary Furlong tells Stephanie McBride how her photographic project with accompanying text delves into the memories of her childhood
Photographer Mary Furlong is inspired by ‘the commonplace and overlooked, hidden histories, everyday objects’, and her most recent work, Not the Location of My First Kiss, is ‘about memories, misremembering and mixing things up’. Undertaken during lockdown as a final-year degree project, it also incorporates text as a key component. Her website’s introductory image shows a clutch of old photographs, scalloped-edged and fading – snapshots that would usually act as a trigger for memories. But Furlong reverse-engineers the process, starting with memories, then constructing her photographs as resonances of them. ‘Everything starts with a memory. From that a photograph is made and a piece of text written,’ she explains.
Unravelling the sequence of carving on the stones has been challenging but has been helped by the fact that there are so many examples to study, writes Elizabeth Shee Twohig
