Experimental

Appropriating Memories

The materials used to create this body of work are a pile of 35mm slides bought in a market in Cardiff, these images record someone’s life around the 60s,70s early 80s.

After digging through the slides of a stranger’s life. I realised I could not decipher what was happening but I could reconstruct it, and give them a new purpose. I made several structures using layered mount cardboards of different shapes and sizes. I projected some of the slides on these three-dimensional structures, with the main purpose of interfering with the images and removing them from their context, purpose, and original form. The projection of the slides provided them with a sense of floating in the vastness as if time and space become suspended. I also found that some parts of the image became concealed, producing an interesting visual de-fragmentation of the image, which also varies depending on the perspective you choose to see the images. It makes the audience/photographer able to control the amount of visual information they want to see or conceal.

The main purpose of documenting important moments of someone’s life has changed, but the content is not relevant anymore. The meaning of the slides came to lie in the appropriation and intervention of them and the different forms they can acquire.

Something familiar, and intimate becomes public, manipulated and open to interpretation.

Untitled Women

Exhibit at: Martin Parr Foundation, 2018

Resins titles: 18″, 27″, 23″

Mixed media, liquid-silver emulsion on resin, inkjet print.

After digging through my archive, my background, and my “foundations” I realised my trajectory as a photographer/ image maker has developed from an interest in finding new possibilities of representation through different devices, methods and aesthetics. The continuous search for interesting and original forms provides a new dimension to photography. The idea of enhancing the concept through the form or the form through the concept. Resin makes the image more durable and provides a unique value as you cannot create an exact replica of it, providing a new form.

The fabrication of the resins requires a long and tricky process. I have exposed negatives from my family archive, choosing deliberate portraits of women from 1920-the 30s as a way of empowering their presence, due to the reduced representation women have suffered historically and nowadays.

River Usk (Estuary)

I created aesthetically pleasing photographs of the mouth of the river Usk in Wales. The decision of photographing the estuary was due to the particularity of the place. The mouth is a place where big changes in the appearance of the river happen. It is a water passage where rivers meet the sea and salt water is measurably diluted with fresh water. The environment is strong enough to deal with this frequent transition. This place evokes change, transition, and an endless process happening in a place and space where elements fusion constantly.

For this body of work, I used reversal film. I submerged and kept the slides in small bottles with substances such as water, seaweed, sand etc. that I collected from the estuary. I  left them submerged for weeks. My idea was to physically incorporate the subject matter into the creative process, creating a strong interaction between the place, material and image. The creative process was to create new images of the estuary through its own substances. 

 The time spent submerged was decisive; the more time the slides were submerged, the more changes appeared on them. The elements were transforming the slides, altering the colours and affecting the appearance. The final photographs are unique, adding character to the identity of the place through its own elements.

Forms

After many years of living abroad; I experience a mix between nostalgia and curiosity, being between two lands, and feeling a disconnection from both places that intrigue me. The focus of my artistic practice has been shaped by those experiences and it is strongly influenced by my heritage and identity. Concepts such as culture, traditions, and belonging are common subjects of my work, as well as a constant feeling of transience or absence. The impossibility of translating a full sense of what this disconnection and sensations have meant to me, parallel similar frustrations in the act of photography itself. It concludes with a continuous aim for searching within the creative possibilities and continuous expansion of a vocabulary of photographic vision. A persistence in looking for better ways of representation through experimentation. I have created an abstract experience using photographs from an archive found in my family house. There are no more references to the content apart from the title, which provides some sort of clarity or connection to the images but, instead, I am focusing on the new meanings created by that new form. The spectator is unable to decode the content producing similar feelings of disconnection that I experience.

Edition of 15 images