In this most recent document, a continuation of a body of work started in 2005, I am investigating the relationship between daughter and mother this time using light and shadow as violent device of unlinking and catalyst to breakage of the formerly combined body (the Tenby, Conversion and Garden Documents) – visual themes of division are employed; the fold, seam, contrast, and fluidity as feminine symbol. My daughter is now sixteen, both child and woman; our relationship young and mature. These images are created performing secret acts where the photograph serves as decoy and portal. {2017}
In this document I explore the space between girl and woman, this time through the use of still life photography to illustrate the abstract changes between child and adult. Beautiful and troubling, these in-camera constructions engage the viewer with both lucid detail and incomplete dreams. Fold upon fold, a singular portal unveils a deceitful truth, double-minded (untrustworthy) like photography itself. Themes of sexuality, pain, maturation, independence and fear exist for both mother and daughter in this pivotal stage. My references find a common language within our layered dialogue. Artifice confuses the real, much as in Dorothea Tanning’s figurative paintings, while visual elements from early 20th century surrealist film are suggested to form a rhetoric of transition, an awkward adolescence. These photographs, for me, continue the journey from the place of departure within the final images of The Garden Document. The external is left behind for an interior realm, the surface penetrated in search of what is new. {2013}
Here, I continue my photographic work by taking my subject outside into a garden where I play in golden hour light. I am pressing out the limits of the interior confines of skin from corset to explosion. In a play of Eden, I struggle out the story of individuality and independence; of mother and daughter, of skin and spirit and of nature and artifice. In this series my daughter is 9 years old and in combination with my body is nearly believable as a whole person; the two of us are one in this once bucolic now chaotic verdant room. A summer’s day end acts as a character in this testimony of change and conversion as the story metamorphoses and our form disappears. This series is part three of an ongoing work which began in 2006. {2010}
In this body of work I investigate the threshold between consciousness and dreaming, an enigmatic place full of mystery and magic. Within our home I construct a stage, a fantastic platform, where over the cycle of a week I photograph my daughter sleeping. The innocence of childhood dress-up games are visited as I enter the photograph wearing outfits chosen by my daughter the night before. A new being emerges as I place my daughter’s head on my own body completing the question. Inspired by the presence of catastrophe and awe found in Caravaggio’s “The Conversion of Saint Paul” and Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” I continue my study of the mother/daughter bond. {2008}
This is the beginning of a photographic series investigating the space between mother and daughter. I take portraits in a home environment where my daughter and I enact secret stories together while wearing Marks and Spencer undergarments, a gesture toward my own mother and an investigation into female rituals and sentimental inheritance. These secret stories we then replay until the camera captures us as mother and daughter separately in the same position. This allows for digital reassembly and the final presentation of the two as one. I digitally place my five-year-old daughter’s head on my own body; the photograph resolving the dichotomy of the relationship. In closing the gap between mother and daughter these images, whilst formal, subversively provide room for fantasy, identity reversal, and reveried escape. Inspired by Lady Clementina Hawarden’s photographic portraiture of her daughters in tableau contrasted with short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, my daughter and I paradoxically elude the gaze by way of performance and imaginative abstraction into a place, inspired by Vermeer’s women; intangible. {2006}