PORTFOLIO

About

A Sense of Regret

(Part of Love in Absence)

Adopting the character of Fishface (a.k.a. Visage du Poisson – a pet name given to me as a child) black and white Polaroid film explore the fantasy reunion of father and daughter with their social archive at a specific meeting place. Somewhere between fantasy and actuality, this meeting is symbolic of the absent moments where that otherwise may well have appeared in their family album.

The meeting place itself – an iron-age mound on a hilltop overlooking the family home – is heterotopic, neutral. It is valued for its familial significance, and metaphorical of the contact craved and isolation felt from the other when opposite sides of the world.

Whilst the context of this work originates from my own family’s photographic album, it is representative of the private and public nature of archives. Publicly, family albums document the life moments and members of a specific social group, whilst privately they transmit memories to future generations through the telling of stories anchored to those photographs. If this knowledge is absent, how will members of these people be remembered when memories of them fade? What if they are not included at all?