Can you share a little bit about yourself and your practice?
Firstly, I am a wife, a mother of three boys and a wire fox terrier. I have always been fascinated in exploring my family tree and learning about the people that came before me. Although not self portraits, I use myself to recreate the roles of women within society and within the family unit over the past 150 years with inspiration drawn from my own family photographs. I started The Family Album series in 1999 and have revisited it more recently, adding to the project. I am now much older and play a much different role than I first did as a young woman which I feel creates a whole new dynamic to my work.
What themes are you exploring within your work?
Through my work I explore the roles of women within society, the roles of women within the family and how these dynamics have changed over the past century. I explore the fashions and what was expected of us as women in each era.
Do you work with found photographs or family archives? If you work with both, do you have a different relationship to the pieces while creating them?
I predominantly work with photographs from my own family archives. My nan used to keep hundreds of 1 family photos in large Quality Street tins and as a child I would spend hours looking through them making up stories in my head as to who each person was and what I thought their life might have been like. I have always been fascinated in social history and just how peoples lives would have been in different decades, so love studying any images from the past.
Are there any vintage photo artists you admire?
I greatly admire the work of Chino Otsuka. Exploring themes of home, identity, memory and belonging. I especially love her 'Imagine Finding Me' body of work.
Tina Barney's work - I love her intimate documentary photos of her family life from 1974 that can now be called vintage.
Also Lee Shulman's - The Anonymous Project - his curation of a vast collection of 'snapshots' of everyday life - families, relationships, social history, fashion and nostalgia. displayed without any connotations, I love that we are free to create our own narratives regarding all the images. I am excited to visit this Exhibition in Berlin in a couple of weeks.
