Institution
Ulster University, Belfast School of Art
Medium
Photography
Graduation Year
Class of 2023
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Photography - film and digital - forms the main part of my practice, and in recent years I have incorporated text and experimented with audio, video, and camera-less photography. My work is highly autobiographical, I am interested in memory and misremembering, stories, personal histories, local places, and their hidden histories, the commonplace and the generally overlooked. I am inspired by what I find around me, everyday objects, situations, and chance remarks.‘The apple I would never eat’ is an elegiac, autobiographical, location-based love story made in response to the untimely death of my dog Nancy. Facing death, Nancy’s death, mortality, my own; investigating memory, the uncanny, what is left behind, traces; looking for ghosts, just the one ghost; examining liminal spaces and times, time, and the idea of an afterlife, a life after.These images are from the chapter ‘Belongings’, I converted the sitting room into a purpose-made studio and made temporary sculptures out of Nancy’s belongings and photographed them before storing them away again.Through the act of making these static and silent images, I am using photography as a vehicle for mourning. Writing gives these images a voice and creates a third space between image and text. I am photographing something that cannot be seen, making the invisibility of loss visible and with the addition of text creating a third space; an abstract space, a liminal space between life and death, a space for the living and the dead to inhabit.
