In my practice I use appropriated imagery, taking imagery the media feeds me, and I regurgitate it back out. This act is also a way of looking at how digital developments allow for a more personal documentation of contemporary events and giving a sense of closeness to these events. Reflecting on how the post digital sphere, littered with imagery, impacts how images are handled: digital developments allow for a more personal documentation of contemporary events and give a sense of closeness to these events, these images can then be shared instantly to a mass audience, and claimed through a screenshot.
My next project currently titled “ur mother and mine” is a body of work in which I continue with the unfinished artworks from my mum, focusing on the dichotomy between family and kinship, ageing, womanhood and inherited trauma. The idea for the project came about through making my own work, and subconsciously creating works dealing with the same issues (trauma, violence, loss and abandonment) as my mums’ work dealt with. Although I was never exposed to her work, and we hadn’t spoken about these issues, I came to realise our practices echoed one another.
The combination of the stills from old feature films in my mums work and the found media images from my work juxtapose one another bringing together the notion of the lack of distinction between the cinematic violence from the old Hollywood film stills, and the mainstream media violence of the contemporary media coverage.
Regarding my mums practice she states that her work is concerned with “issues around violence, beauty, emptiness, decay, destruction, dereliction, order and chaos.” Her art “evolves through an intentionally intuitive rather than an analytical process.” Both of our practices begin with the “continual search for images” which collectively seem to have strong associations with notions of abandonment. Her work often uses digital prints, sometimes counter balanced with panels of pure colour, as well as film footage. “The viewers struggle to distinguish between real and fictional creates a tension which mirrors the contradictory nature of the subject matter”
I intend to bridge together my practice with my mums’ practice, which already inherently overlap. Initially I tried to reject the accidental crossovers between our practices, but through embracing the links we have, the work becomes not only about imagery and image politics, but also about subconscious inherited traumas. Which is inverted in on itself from the traumas held by the images. Not clear what this last sentence means or if it should be a separate sentence?
