Objects and arrangements

The output is a creative project, comprising a collection of photography, digital montage and animation, and is part of a broader and ongoing body of photographic work responding to bereavement and inheritance, to explore the power and meaning of the familial object. Research process: This project takes as its starting point a family archive of a collection of art objects and art materials inherited from the artist's mother, in particular a plaster bust made of her mum in the 1950s, alongside vernacular family snapshots taken at the same time. The work draws on ideas about the ‘affective object’ (Casella and Woodward 2014: 104), ideas of ‘co-presence’ (Barthes 1980), and the ways in which materiality (or immateriality) enables the image to be performed (Edwards & Elart: 2004: 10). Research insights: The work responds creatively to the partial visual culture of a life lived, to suggest that family photographs, objects and artefacts continue to be resonant in some way and that through a creative process of repurposing and re-contextualisation, existing meaning can be drawn out and re-animated by enabling new creative and visual associations to arise. In this specific case the work highlights the different ways in which different the mediums of sculpture, photography and the moving image memorialise, reflecting on the changing technologies of representation. Dissemination: The work has been exhibited in a number of ways including a display at Leeds Arts University, 2016, in solo show Objects and Arrangements at St Martins Church LS7 2018, in an article in the Leeds Church Institute Magazine 2018, in group exhibition Make Good Leeds Arts University 2019, and in group exhibition Peer at Vrij Paleis Amsterdam Sept 2019