This month my work was part research, part review and part practical with some student feedback sessions.

My research previously touched on work by Geoffrey Batchen on photography and remembrance. As a follow on from that, I looked at the idea of metonymy and on how an object that is in some way related to a person can become a substitute for that person when they are missing and specifically how photography relates to metonymy. I also looked at the work of John Berger on the memory of strangers and the violence of photography and Elizabeth Edwards about the tactile and aural characteristics of photography.

I have taken some photographs and worked on some haptic test pieces based around the grave and the graveyard. My work touches on 2 variations on this idea:

• an idea I had about of fragmentation and how we can know a person and how much can ever be shown or discovered through memorial
  This work uses a photograph of a broken gravestone to which I have added fragments of images from my daughter’s life. I am interested here in the tiny fragments which in themselves mean little, but together build up into a more rounded sense of a past life.
• a related idea about two-dimensional nature of photographs shown against the background of a graveyard which shows tumbled down gravestones.
  For this work I photographed a graveyard and stitched imaged together to create a letterbox format. I have deliberately left this as a curved image as I wanted to use that shape to build a model. My model put the landscape on some card and to this I added some photographs of my daughter which I have constructed into literal ‘headstones’. This work is about exploring death in a graveyard of forgotten people and using this as a backdrop to consider a ‘known death’.

These two works have made me question how relevant the graveyard is to my project. Through these works I have been considering that my project, initially conceived as a way of showing a medical image and putting back a sense of a real person, ties together with death, both of the subject but also forces the audience to confront their own mortality. How then to convey death, mortality (and this might well contain the medical image as a form of symbol), grief and loss in a visual sense? I am intrigued by John Berger’s idea of the still image being torn from the original context of which that image was a part. He speaks that the image seized by camera as an act of violence. I have previously explored the idea of changing the context of the medical scan and presenting it as an art image. It is interesting to think more on Berger’s idea that a life remembered through photography is a torn fragment forced into a new context. The work of Elizabeth Edwards who said photographs “are tactile, sensory things that exist in time and space, and thus in embodied cultural experience” This again is an interesting thought. Is the modern western idea of the photograph as a social object less about the extended family setting and more about the ‘dry’ space of the gallery or the academic paper?

The physical works I have created have once again filled me with doubts and I question myself. I am starting to form ideas and can see how my research informs my creative work which in turn feeds back into my thought process and onto further directions of research. However, I worry that I don’t yet have a cohesive whole in my mind as an end point. I worry about quality of my creative work and if my research is lacking.

Part of these doubts are because of the nature of home study, which have always thought makes me feel a little paranoid, so to try and combat the feeling of isolation I spoke about my work to two groups of students and following on from those chats, I have some links and other artists work to explore. I think next time, rather than just talk about my work I might let them see some examples to bring my work to life for them.

The other part of my doubts is partly due to the emotional pull of working on this subject which impacts my sense of balance so to speak.

In Project 5 next month I will continue my research and provide a mid-point review, detailing progress so far and what I see happening for rest of this unit and beyond.