My work quietly broaches the experience of the emigrant and the temporal fragility of the lives of those who must leave. It articulates their strategies of learning and assimilation - of survival even - in photographs tempered by the mores, sanctions and beliefs of the society in which they were made.
The photographic act serves a twofold purpose in this series - that of the dig of the archaeologist, and that of the reflexive exploration of a society dependent on a migrant workforce to assist in the fulfilment of its ambition. Located in the march between the realms of the autocratic and the democratic, the images allude to the conservative nature of the society being explored and the methodology employed in making the work. The photographs act as both apertures of seeing and archaeological density maps, physical and conceptual ways of articulating being ‘in-between’ - neither fish nor flesh, permanent resident nor naturalised citizen.
