When I went
on a solar print workshop a few months ago I used old family photos as the basis
for some designs and I want to continue using these as source material for this
project
We all have
a stash somewhere of old photos, some of relatives and friends we recognise and
others who we don’t have a clue about who they are. As time passes they just
become faces. We may know their name, if it is written on the back, but we don’t
know anything about them.
I also think
most families will have a scattering of heroes and villains in amongst the
majority of the ordinary people who make up their ancestry. Their stories may
have been completely fictionalized in the telling and retelling, or just
forgotten over the years.
I want to
combine these two ideas, the hidden stories and the almost anonymous figures.
I’ve decided
base my images on the children’s rhyme “Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, rich man,
poor man, beggar man, thief”. We’ve probably all got some of these amongst our
antecedents.
I’m not sure
yet what structure to use. You’d think I’d learn from experience and sort this
out first. It would avoid a lot of problems further down the road! However, at the
moment I’m contemplating a series of unbound images jumbled together in a
box/container the same way that the original source photos are kept, although I
also quite like the idea of a frieze of dancing dolls.
This is
Agnes Hall. I decided to divorce her from Thomas.
