About My Work

....the people, the places, the days out, the days in, the hates, the indifference, the given, the taken, the stolen, the remembered and even the forgotten. (George Shaw 2001)”

My work is about absence, loss and trace.   Most of the work has come about as a result of spending time photographing areas of Belfast that were once full of families, but are now derelict. I am interested in the shared histories of the people who lived in the now empty houses.  I have gathered photographs of people related to each other, related to me and unknown images. 

 I use photographs of people as a starting point because “ the photograph does not necessarily say ‘what is no longer’ but only ‘what has been’” (Barthes, Camera Lucida).   A photograph has, according to Barthes, something to do with resurrection, and is absolute evidence of a life lived at some point in time.  A photograph could be seen as an analogy of life, lives fade, become fragile and eventually perish as do photographs.   Often there is the strangeness of looking at a person, alive and vibrant in a photograph and trying to balance it with the knowledge that they are no longer here – are we looking at life or death? 

Alongside knowing that what you can see in a photograph is ‘what has been’, we also know that these are only moments in time and that what we are looking at are golden moments, Sunday best, posed school photographs, family outings, but we have no knowledge of what is happening outside the frame of that photograph. 

“Photographs literally offer a snapshot of the past, a temporal fragment of an ongoing moment in which we can no longer see to the right or left of the frame, can no longer judge the scene for ourselves, firsthand, can no longer experience the event in real time. (C Mullins 2006)”

By blurring the paintings, adding layers of encaustic to some and putting in only traces of features (and in some no features at all), I hope this work will trigger a fragment of thought, a fleeting memory, to encourage the viewer to make connections with their own history and complete the narrative themselves. I want the viewer to recognise, not the people, but a feeling of familiarity with the images, either in the turn of a head or a familiar setting.