Artist Statement

Every modern family has countless photo-albums, folders of hundreds of photos of their children, holidays, late relatives. Whispers of their past collecting dust on the walls, framed and placed on tables, or sat in the loft slowly decaying only to be brought out at Christmas for a lovely sense of nostalgia, or to be shoved into their children’s faces to talk about that one beach trip where you whinged about not wanting your hair to get wet. 

What memory is conjured when one looks at these photos? Joy, sadness, indifference? And how much can we trust that memory, is the memory of the picture staring back at you? Or is it the memory of that individual that was significant in your life for so many years? Some photographs radiate certain emotions or definitive memories. But over the years of living one’s life it seems blurred, a thin veil over your memory, a spiderweb you can’t quite dust off. My work is to make an audience think of how memory functions as something triggered by an image, whilst using titles that explain my memory of that photograph. Making viewers think about what a significant moment is and what isn’t; whether that moment is understood as significant at the time it was taken, or it gains significance later, when you ‘rediscover’ it.  The covering of images represents the rediscovery of the image, but also some mistrust of whether it truly represents ‘what happened’.