Item NMC/2011 - Mother and Child

Digital painting of a mother and her child, displayed in an MDF lightbox.

Artist's description:

An observation or conversation will spark a body of work. In this case, it was a conversation I had with my Grandad talking about his late wife and my grandmother, June. This conversation entailed him showing me photo-albums that I had never seen, images of my mum growing up in Canada and images of June, a woman I had never met and barely knew what she looked like. I was struck by how few images there were of my mum with her mum in existence, especially in comparison to how many there are of my mum and me.

So, I began to digitally restore these rare photographs, multiplying them. I took photos on my phone of the photo albums to document the images and later reproduce them. I am interested in the varying semiotic languages of different material methods which drives extensive material processes in my practice. For example, once an image was digitally painted it would undertake different material processes including oil painting, projection, screen printing and inkjet printing onto backlit film. Marlene Dumas wrote in her poem Women and Painting: “Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns”. This sums up exactly how it felt to reproduce these images across mediums. I was recycling the images into varying materials creating layers of memories that circulated them into the present. Moreover, the process of continually drawing June with varying techniques began to create a physical material connection to a pioneering woman I am related to but have never met.

Underpinning my practice is a fascination with how changing technologies have altered our relationship to memory and time. More specifically, I am intrigued with how technologies have come to visually represent generations. The technology of a time determines how things were visually documented, for example, to see June is to look through a physical photo album, to see my last family photo is now to look back on my phone’s camera roll. My practice explores how this disparity can be used to articulate the passing of time whilst simultaneously reproducing and restoring documentation of previous generations, increasing our connection to the past and understanding our present.