In my research I used ideas of genealogy (familial and technological) to explore the heritage and memory of the media of self and familial representation in the ‘family album’ and how it has changed visual recollection using photography and its subsequent progression to the moving image utilising technological advances such as 8mm cine film and then video (analogue and digital).
Using my own family records I have created a catalogue of the images and recordings. In the longer term this will include the recording and notation of what the styles are and how self and others representation of the family (professional photographers as well as family ‘snaps’ from holidays and the like) differ. All the while I hope to record the difference between how a family and its individuals are shown - or sought to be seen - in varying familial surrounds from the informal ‘snap’ to the more formal and ‘public’ spaces in which family photography or moving image recordings were taken: i.e., weddings, funerals and other events where ‘outsiders’ were present or would see such imagery. The ultimate aim is to create an exhibition piece using one or more of the media explored linked through a genealogy structure.
The ‘memory’ of families - its collective consciousness - is a construction of the real merged with the ideal and presumed (often quite falsely). Or is it?. Using the representations of a single family line - three generations - through research and active engagement with, I explore the notion of memory - the heritage of memory AND memory heritage. In a more socially inclusive sense I try to reach some kind of conclusion on the value and or truth of the familial memory as a record of the past through visual representation (it may not record the truth of an event or how it was experienced but it is a kind of truth). It will only be an attempt because any engagement with familial memory has little to do with any actual truth but a memory of a truth and, as such, a distortion premised on shared yet often conflicting recollections.
It is the notion of memory as a family’s heritage using various media that seems to often lead or define a memory rather than the memory itself having any degree of actuality of legitimacy. The art of the images, in whatever media can often replace the ‘truth’ of an occasion. This ‘conflict’ - the greater power of imagery to replace truth - is what I explore and use in this particular art work. In putting the images together I have constructed a past, a present and future from the still I have chosen to represent. Hopefully, the viewer will then ‘add’ a new story to it too through their own eyes and familial and social history.
Here, on this website, are images of three generations, of all styles and spread over a period of nearly 100 years. I have reduced the originals to ‘match’ as ingle style of size, colour (black and white) and low pixilation. In doing this I aim to show the similarity of time (they are all past) with a sameness of purpose: as a witness to the already gone and the soon to be gone. The randomness of the image order revealing the links to each other still through their thread of shared family history and the way in which the people (at their different stages of life) interact from image to image. The same ‘type’ of image appears in each generation and the viewer can enter this shared familial album to create the stories much as we all do in our own families.
As an artist it is the idea of heritage - as something reserved for me by my father for his son for my son, my society - that this research opportunity has allowed me to focus on in order to create a new work of art (in the long term, combined with an exhibition) that will enable others to share my own delusions (or memories) to explore for themselves what their own memory / memories are and how ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’ they are. I have been able to frame, define and devise (at least start to), a new piece of art through shared images, photographs, cine film, video and audio recordings (linked to video and additional new recordings). On this website you can see the initial images.
In some sense this is a definition - a working hypothesis - of the artist photographer and film / video maker. It is also a definition - hypothesis - of the problems an artist (in all media) has. The nature of the work - the exploration and examination of various media forms - has enabled me to define the media I will use for the work I seek to use this research to define (photography, video, collage and audio soundscapes of existing and / or newly created sound material).
To some extent it takes one of my previous works - a 365 day calendar of signs of disability - to its logical conclusion about the nature of signs and how they define for people our directions, limits and taboos. Signs, like family imagery (and so much memory of one’s own and others social groups), are meaningless in themselves but rich in shared and collective consciousness.
As a disabled person, a disabled artist - a Disability Artist, the research allowed me to explore the notions of outsiderness - otherness - within the representation of family (my own) as a metaphor for the notion of the normal and the abnormal that exists within all families (and within many ‘normal’ individuals within the normal family). Significantly, in having an added - different - collective memory and heritage of another family as well (I went to a special boarding school from the age of 6 to 16) I have had the opportunity to bring in another element to the research and potential art has enabled me to explore / transcend the traditional idea of the family to be inclusive of otherness and applicable as a universal.
The notion of otherness - which I have had, lived, throughout my own life and many others I have shared a family with - allows me an in-road to the universal idea(l)s of the memory and heritage of the past through the social norm and the socially abnormal collective (families and the family as a metaphor).
As an artist, with an academic background (a PhD in the issue of the representation of otherness), the medium is as much a key part of the nature, significance and meaning (in the past, present and future) of the product as the subject and/or the artist’s intention. I seek to develop the exploration of the media I am looking at (the range of material) and the ideas I can bring to bear on them. With each image being, on this website, reduced to a clear similarity of format (size, low pixilation, high contrast, desaturation of colour) the era, identity of the people and the relationships between those photographed is quite obvious with a few chosen exceptions to throw the viewer in a self of examination of who they are. In essence, all I am seeking is for the viewer to think about who we are in order to think about who they are.
