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“Last night I had a dream where different versions of myself were alone on individual islands. Each version of myself was a different age and I would watch people almost making it to the shores before they would drift off into the distance, leaving me to look out into the endless waters.”
There’s something about working with inks that is so different from my previous photographic works. In my photography I think a lot about precision, clean lines, and knowing the conditions that I need in order to create a piece of work that I imagine, and then create. Contrastingly, working with inks has been unpredictable, multilayered and at times uncomfortable.
I’ve learnt to sit in the discomfort of the process in the same way I sit in the discomfort of my own stories. I’ve learnt to trust that as a droplet falls on to the page and finds its own way to create meaning, so will I, if I just trust the process.
Whilst making these prints I’ve thought deeply about our individual and collective cultural thinking related to islands. There can be the romanticism of them: distant, far away tropical lands, a place to reflect in solitude. Yet they can also represent loneliness, unreachable lands that remain untouched by others.
I think of clusters of islands, archipelagos, and swimming between yet always returning to oneself. The journey between islands, and the journey that others take to and from our own island, and the danger of leaving, with the uncertainty of if we will be able to return.
In these works I imagine fictional lands where people like me - those with this longing to belong but feel a strong sense of unbelonging - can find a feeling of home in a place that is for now, undiscovered.
Interestingly my previous work called Insula - after the Latin word for "island" - was named that for the same reasons. It’s over a decade later and I’m still thinking about islands.
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One of the clearest memories I have of speaking to a therapist, aged 18, is describing to her how I experience my thoughts.
It is as if there is a projector playing a film of my thoughts that I am watching in my mind. Another projection of a film plays on top, and another, and another, all at once. The layers of the films become enmeshed and mixed up. The sounds of the films are also being played on top of one another. I cannot seem to decipher what belongs to where. I try to imagine the subtitles of the films but the words are just indecipherably layered on top of each other. It becomes chaos in my mind.
A week before my 40th birthday I received my ADHD diagnosis.
In many ways it has not changed anything. I have not changed. I am not someone else. But It has given me a greater understanding of how my brain functions and how it works differently to others. It has explained so much of my past and provided validation. It’s also helped me to understand this sense of grief - trying to figure out what is ‘wrong’ with me.
The first day that I took my stimulant medication for ADHD I felt like an alien in my own mind and body. My usual thoughts, all swirling around at once and clattering with cymbals for attention, were gone. My mind was… silent. It was, at first, disconcerting. I watched an entire TV episode without moving, flinching or pausing to do a hundred other tasks.
To return to my initial analogy, it was like watching a singular film with the visuals, audio, and subtitles all in sync, without the constant interference.
The works in this project are Polaroid images of either self-portraits or images made whilst walking, which is something that calms my racing mind. The polaroids have then been submerged into a solution of my stimulant medication for extended period of times creating manipulations, degradations, and ultimately new versions of the original images.
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Drawing as a practice provides me the opportunity to process my thoughts. It is an act of self-soothing. Sometimes I am engrossed in the repetition of mark making for hours. At other times the process is short and over quickly.
These works - another step away from a solely photographic practice - represent drawing as a method of encoding and decoding thoughts, memories and experiences.
The circular works explore my thoughts surrounding proximity and closeness to others. How close is too close? How much space do I need from others? The intricate repetition of the mark making requires my immense concentration, ironically in direct conflict with my ADHD’s impatience.
Other works relate to places of longing, belonging and unbelonging from the past, present, and future, inspired by maps.
Alongside these are pieces that use asemic writing as a mode for encrypting thoughts and feelings about those currently in, or no longer in my life. They disguise words of pain and celebratory expressions of love wrapped up in decipherable symbols.
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There is a pressing reminder that I don’t have a family archive. I’m aware of it as people make comments about all the things that their families have held on to for generations, the photo albums that their parents have produced, or the fear of how much they will inherit.
These are not my reality. Hearing this is like peering into another world for me. The archive that I am grappling with is one that barely exists. I have my own archive of my photographs made over the last 3 decades, but beyond that, the familial archive is incredibly sparse. I have just a few belongings of my mother’s and hardly any photographs of my immediate family. It isn’t just the objects that are missing, it’s the stories too. In some ways I miss those more. I have a longing for something to hold in my heart more than what I can hold in my hand. The archive I hold is an archive of absence over presence. The void of where an archive could have been.
I work with what I do have as if it is found material. Interrupting its authenticity, reimagining past into present and making peace with an unknown future.
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I’ve always been fascinated by words. Our capacity to use them wisely or poorly, the tone we use when we are communicating them and the impacts that they can have on us - sometimes forever.
I Never Wanted You Anyway.
These words belong to another. They are not mine. They’ve lingered in the back of my mind for decades. These 5 words can be so cutting but also so freeing, depending on if you are the receiver or deliverer.
In these works I’ve returned and re-returned to the words in this statement that I heard as a child and as an adult. I’ve experimented with interchangeable subtleties, words that oscillate between ever and never, wanted and needed.
The words move from the internal subconscious to the external, from 2D to 3D and back to 2D, through a process of exorcisms, transformations and reclamations.