Fine Art Photography and Moving Image
2024
Graduate Show 2024
Clare Street, Limerick.
1st - 9th June
35mm slide projection, photographic prints, sound installation
An exploration of the relationship between memory, place and grief. Attempting to connect to my late father, I aim to construct a knowing of him, through the objects and places he once knew.
I attempt to decode the language of these objects and places, constructing a narrative that reflects my understanding of a person who I never met. Returning to these places we knew apart, to bridge the gap of absence that exists between us.
Through the projection of slides, I attempt to map the landscape of my grief and trust where it leads me. Navigating the past through archival family material, trying to recollect something that never occurred.
I can attempt to reinsert myself into the family life we could have had but knowing that it could only ever be a nearness of him.
Tíoc
Description of work
Emphasising the materiality of the photograph and the photograph as an object. To develop methodologies which seek to draw attention to this; through analogue photography, crafting, experimental book making, collage etc.
Additional interventions made with and upon the surface of my photographs, I can tease out the difficult topics explored in my work.
Through experimental methods of working with my family archive, the work affirms my sense of self, and connection with my dad.
Driving Lessons
The Lilywhites
In my studio practice, I explore my family archival material such as photographs and personal belongings.
After my discovery of the archival slide collection, which was the primary form to record my dad’s family life, I have been captivated by the medium.
Furthermore, the act of projection with slide film. I can attempt to navigate my dad’s memories through the archival slides. Skipping through time, backwards and forwards on the Kodak Carousel, it acts as a time machine. Which aligns the action with memory.
I believe through projection of these archival slides recording the family life, I can transcend the physical distance that time and finitude has placed between myself and my dad.
The flat ontological surface of the photograph becomes a hauntological form when projected. The projected slides becomes part of its surface which it lights upon. An extension of the photograph, seeping into the wall. It is transparent and does not have an objectivity. It is temporal, once the projector turns off, the image disappears.
I believe that it brings the past into the present, like a ghost that haunts it. It transcends mere documentation and it allows me to construct a knowing and an understanding of who my father was.
Returning to remember.
By connecting the past and the present, I can return to these places and photograph what was photographed in the archival imagery.
Through the photographs I take, I attempt to construct a fantastical past and embark on a detective trail to uncover alternate versions of a real one.
Memoires are inconsistent and easily manipulated. It is not a credible archive. I wish to question the very concept of a real past and an imagined past.
Reimagining narratives and acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in the act of remembering.
Using the medium of slide film to take these photographs and returning to the places of importance in Kildare. I can play in an act of remembering. Remembering imagined memories.
As our identity can be composed of absences and scarcity of memory. A forgotten and repressed territory. I intend to question what a known memory make. Engaging in a perpetual dance between nostalgia and the pursuit of truth. The mythic and the authentic.
experimental book binding