Contextual Frameworks: Concept of my Studio Practice

Nov 2

Throughout my practice on the Visual Arts degree the basis of my work has always been on the subject of family whether it has been questioning how the absence of my father has affecting my growing up, to contemplating my childhood, memories, youth and the current relationship I have with my mother and my five siblings. I have always been interested in memory and psychoanalytical theories such as the Electra complex, repression, the unconscious mind and how we deal with certain situations.

More recently I have been studying family albums and photographs and incorporating them into my studio practice so it seemed appropriate to cover this subject in more detail and use it for the basis of my dissertation. The work I am creating now questions the ‘truth vs. fiction’ debate with photographs. I do this by taking a snapshot and recontextualising it by changing its size, transferring it on to a new surface (wallpaper, bakeware, tiles, and handmade papers), fragmenting, cropping and refocusing the viewers’ attention, choosing what to reveal and what to hide.I find family photographs extremely precious as they provide us with a framework for memories of growing up and deceased family members. When a loved one is lost sometimes a photograph is one of the only points of recall we have. Although I am interested in how and why nearly all families choose to capture the same images. It fascinates me why we only photograph the ‘good’ and how these images are physical reminders of how we repress the bad.I want to explore why we need to take photographs in the first place and are the memories we have real or are they just the photographic images we are remembering? Are photographs just a way of escaping our own mortality and a way of proving that we ever existed at all?Sorry for the irregular post patterns, I've spent this week and last focusing my attention on my dissertation so there's been little studio work being produced. Things should be back to normal by next week.