“Of what use was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this?”
” – Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
The capturing of images through photography is a major theme running through my work, how we use images to construct and manipulate our narratives, what we choose to include and to leave out. This series of work is autobiographical; I draw directly from family photographs, sketching out the esoteric feelings between what has been captured and recorded and my experiences as a child away from the camera. On the one hand, the work focuses on childhood memories and family narratives, how time and personal choices can distort our recollections giving weight to something outwardly small and altogether losing things deemed, by others, to be of importance. It also draws on the traditions of storytelling, the moralistic tales told to children where adversity is an unavoidable part of life and must be faced and overcome. I use scale, colour and the image of the toy rabbit to evoke this and an incongruity in the images to examine both the joyful and less comfortable memories of childhood that are born from naivety and the loss of innocence that only time and experience can rationalise. Conjuring childhood memories was part of the motivation behind the pieces but my ambition for the work is to manipulate the viewer in the space between the revealed and hidden, like the lens of a camera, we choose what is seen.
