Exploring the themes of memory and our connection to our own histories, my artwork focuses on my own archive of old negative photographs from relatives and past ancestors. The material physicality and worth of these images are central to my thinking; being such lowly items I am responding to the question ‘why do we keep things?’ by giving a new life to them through delicately etching them into surfaces such as perspex.

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Despite this physical engagement, there will always be a distance and element of loss that will come across in the work. We cannot access the past that is encapsulated in that moment the photo was taken. Instead we might create a narrative of what we think might have happened in that moment and what made it significant enough for it to be captured in time and kept until forgotten or destroyed.

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“For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious”

– Walter Benjamin