Truth, Lies And What The Camera Saw

About

She told me, that is to say, my mother, the mistress of the very tall tale, told me, that before she met my father she fell in love with a very rich Jewish man whose aged mother strongly disapproved of her, a gentile, so much so that she would disinherit him if they married. So they decided to wait until after his mother had died. My mother, though, tired of waiting and left him.

I didn't believe it. 

When my grandmother died an album was found, and therein a photograph of my mother and not-my-father in evening dress gazing into each other's eyes - what the camera saw, and the starting point of this body of work.

The images are translations of my family albums, physical photograms made in wax of people in absence, preserved, contextless.  Without detail, they show the bare bones of memories, framed in found frames which bring with them their own history and lost memories.  Empty frames abound, signifiers of lost memories, while loose images are on their way to being lost.

The larger pictures are an interpretation of my remembering some of the moments caught in those photo albums, the stronger colours an indication of heightened emotion.

I use beeswax as my medium because of its contrary perceived connotations of preservation and jeopardy. It is an ancient medium, properly called encaustic.

My practice is process driven and the mechanical initiation of the pieces - tracing, then sculpting  in pure, filtered translucent beeswax and the ensuing burying and excavating of that image - resonate with the mechanics of laying down a memory or thought and its re-surfacing/recollection.  

​

I work by cutting away all the negative space.  It is for this reason I call these works my physical photograms.  The last excavatory process becomes a painterly one and it is at this stage where the dialogue between me and the work really begins.