My work frequently explores ideas of belonging and presence within the context of individual identity and familial history. I often work experimentally, exploring various mediums, drawing from archival materials and working with both historical and sustainable alternative photographic processes. My graduate work, Voyager, tells a story that blurs the lines between the real and the unreal through the subconscious search for individual liberty. Using the pictorial presence of my grandfather; belonging, identity and memory are explored as I create a fictitious connection through a romanticised, mythlike depiction of a close yet distant, unreachable figure. Feeding my own identity into this fabricated character, a link is drawn between our mutual connection with the open-ended aura of the sea. Alternative photographic methods and the incorporation of visual material from a family kept archive strengthen this link, creating an intimacy and a physicality to the constructed relationship. Sea Beet, a coastal vegetation, and sunlight are used to produce impermanent anthotype prints which hold a ghostly, veiled presence and are destined to fade with time. Bladderwrack seaweed is also used in the development process of film to create ethereal imagery suggestive of a distant dream based upon memory.
