The first month of this unit asked student to produce a summary of work in progress, a tentative plan and a reflective document of around 1,000 words to include a summary and reconsideration of literature review along with a re-treatment of my dissertation proposal along with some key words to help define topic as is relevant to me today.

Reflection

In my literature review I explored the thoughts of Roland Barthes in his seminal work, Camera Lucida, with respect to his mother’s death and his memory of her and his search through old photographs for her essence. I asked if Barthes’s life was surrounded and framed by loss as his father died when Barthes was an infant. His conclusion is that how could any photographs capture the totality of a person and our memory of the dead. Barthes tells us that all he finds in photographs is death. I explored how memories fade and our sense of the dead changes and might be shaped by words or pictures and, of course through time and our own aging. I used the work of Geoffrey Batchen, Marianne Hirsch and Susan Sontag to interrogate Barthes’s ideas exploring thoughts such as remembrance, nostalgia and whether the authors of the ideas I explored had a pre-occupation with death. As I re-read my literature review, I was struck by what Batchen said about what photographs in themselves do not record, “the way they moved, the manner of their speech, the sound of their voice, that lift of the eyebrow when they made a joke, their smell, the rasp of their skin on yours, the emotions they stirred.”

This takes me neatly to my dissertation proposal and my ideas of how to progress my written and my creative work.

I have been questioning the direction, or maybe just my understanding, of my creative work which in turn relates to my written work. I worry in case, subconsciously, I have been taking a safe path to try and avoid discomfort, emotional pain and turmoil. In turn, I wonder if a sense of safety might be restraining my work and my learning and my sense of myself? Am not at all certain but this is a vague thought which been tugging at me for a while. Am struck by Barthes’s idea that all he finds in photographs is death. Does that in part explain why I am questioning the meaning of my work and my vague sense of ‘niceness’ and ‘comfort’ and is a more natural feeling maybe ’discomfort’?

In my dissertation proposal I wanted to look at why people record death through photography in an apparent attempt to stop time and to preserve memories. I stated at the time that this was a very broad base for study. I have been wondering how to approach this subject. I have been thinking about the sense of place and how we might collect objects and whether the photograph in this context is another death object that holds the presence of the dead such as clothing or hair? I wonder about how instant the point of death is and what survives to help build memories in those that live on. The death objects themselves become symbols for the memories they are used to try and preserve. This year my creative efforts will focus onto an external engagement. I can visualise some creative works which start to explore these ideas.

After death everything that is us still exists yet the person is gone with the destruction of the mind. The construction blocks of our bodies doesn’t vanish at the point of death nor after the disposal of the body. After we die, there is a sense that part of us still exists. Is this a metaphor for memory? This brings me to the idea of materials being important. Materials, objects and the very construction blocks from what we are made are all imbued with memory. I wonder if the idea of materiality lends itself to textile artists or maybe pottery or ceramics?

I also wondered about exploring the sense of the boundary. The idea of the River Styx was expressed about one of my creative test pieces, the river separating the living from the underworld. I wonder about the passage of time. If I consider the very point of death where life has ended, is this actually a single point in time? Can we be between life and death, in a sense crossing that river? At what point does death begin? This took me on and I wondered about the idea of a boundary. Is science and art such a boundary? I was invited to a conference in Dundee looking at art and science because of my previous work with the medical scan and wonder if anything I could make use of here. Another option in this same area could be to approach Pfizer who I am doing some consultancy for to try and improve cancer outcomes. A collaboration between science and the physical reality of disease and death on one side and on the other, memory, loss and grief and the desire to record these through art.

One other idea I had was use of the spoken word to accompany my images. I thought about the echoes and resonance of spoken words and how the soundwaves hit our ears then die away to nothing. There is a similarity with looking at an image and, for a brief instant, that image is burned onto the back of our eye before we look away and the image vanishes. Seems that this is a way of describing fading memories and the invention of new stories and secrets. I sent an email to a writer and broadcaster who created some work around the idea of why we might leave no trace of ourselves thinking of ancient burial chambers. She was encouraging even though at that stage I asked for nothing from her. She replied that her work explored the feelings about where sounds come from and their ancient resonances which is very interesting.

I can see connections between my practice and my research with these ideas. Engaging with an external partner has potential to push work in unexpected directions and in so doing can help crystalise the focal point of my research interests and my practice in this project. I do not know at this stage if I would look at a single external facing project or more than one. I did wonder too about whether to look at my body of work as a thread rather than as a single piece of that thread. So, my work would include such an external facing project but this wouldn’t be the totality of my project.

Keywords

Loss. Grief. Guilt

Death and Nihilism. Death and Memory.

Boundaries. (The idea of space between – so the moment between life and death or between memory and absence of memory)