Bloodlines is a series of photographs investigating shared familial traits over the generations. Using passport or identity photos the images are constructs of two or more faces from the matrilineal line in my family resulting in an exotic fantasy hybrid linking one generation to the next. The many different permutations I have created serve as a kind of memorial since the female bloodline in my family is now extinguished..... I am the last one left. When looking at the faces individually the similarities may not be immediately apparent, but when layered in this way the resemblances are uncanny. An eyebrow, a nose, the set of the chin, a glance appearing from one generation to the next, linking us to the past and reaching out to the future……
Archival pigment print on Awagami Murakumo Kozo paper, various sizes, displayed in vintage photo frames
2020
A series made in the aftermath of Brexit when I began to re-examine my European roots. As the child of an English father and Latvian mother I was brought up to feel British. My mother did not teach me Latvian so I can neither speak nor read it. Since my mother's death I accumulated all her Latvian paraphernalia – letters, books, photographs, newspaper cuttings. I find myself going through them all, hopelessly searching for some clues to their meaning but it is a closed world to me which I cannot decipher. These images are a way of making my frustration concrete - random extracts from letters, books and papers have been grafted on to my own photographs of the stark Cornish landscape near my home. The incongruous contrast between the two mirrors the internal conflict I feel - half British, half Latvian, now sadly isolated from the rest of Europe.
Digital collage of scanned documents and text and my own photographs. Image size 10 x 10 cm. Printed on archival matt Hahnemühle photo rag 308gms.
2020
Memories of early childhood days are sporadic and hard to pin down. By revisiting my childhood homes and the places featured in family photographs I had hoped my memories would suddenly come flooding back. They proved to be maddeningly elusive. The photographs have become the memories, imprinted on my brain with repeated looking and the retelling of family stories. The memories themselves are locked away like photographs stuffed in a dusty old drawer and forgotten.
Digital collage of scanned family photographs and medium format Holga negatives. Image size 10 x 10 cm printed on archival matt Innova cotton rag.
2009
As an adult, seeing the world through a child’s eye is difficult. These images of my old childhood haunts, taken with my little plastic Holga camera with its blurry and brightly coloured eye, recreate the dreamlike and slightly disconnected feeling I experienced on returning after all these years.
2009
“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory….everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” *
Looking back at the lost world of the family album.
Digital collage of scanned family photographs.
2009
*Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
An accumulation of days: happy days, sad days, quiet moments at home, the unspectacular everyday, the fleeting nuances easily overlooked. Objects are transformed by a shaft of light, views from the window change with the weather, seasonal rituals are repeated yearly. And all the while the days accumulate, time passes…...
2014
My relationship with my home and the landscape surrounding it is complicated and ambivalent. Bound up with memories of family who once lived here and who have now left home or died, there are many associations, both happy and sad.
Continuing on from a previous series The Room, six years later these photographs depict some of the same objects out in the landscape throughout the changing seasons. They are an attempt at making a mark, leaving a trace – a fugitive memorial.
Silver gelatin prints
2013
“In the midst of life we are in death” – the familiar words from the Book of Common Prayer recited at a Christian funeral service remind us of our own mortality. As far as we know, we are the only species which goes through life with the foreknowledge of its own death and the memorial satisfies a basic, universal human need which cuts across all faiths and beliefs – a need to leave a mark as proof of our existence.
Silver gelatin prints
2012
What remains when someone dies? The space they inhabited with their hopes and dreams, the view from their window, their clothes and possessions, the play of light and shadow as the days pass, and precious memories….
Silver gelatin prints
2008
An open window, the remains of a meal, shoes kicked off in a hurry – these are the traces that people leave behind them as they go about their day. But the traces they leave behind as they pass through your life are not so visible ….
Silver gelatin prints
2008
