I spent a long time away from working directly on the liminal space of death. In part this was because I focused my energies on collaborations and thought about my work in a less frequent or direct way but this was also in part because I need time to think about using children in my work and dealing with how this made me feel. As part of some research I conducted into folk tales for a shared piece of work, I thought about how loose threads of memory might survive the slow grind of time and in the luck involved in whether threads might survive or if they will will be erased. I wondered about my daughter’s death as a single death in a huge world filled with millions and millions of deaths over hundreds of thousands of years. The impossibility of telling her story being and if the tale being worthy of being retold and remembered in any form. I wondered about why some turn to religion. Mine is a brutalist point of view. I don’t believe in an supreme beings. I believe when we die there is nothing left. There is no afterlife and we don’t get to see our loved ones after they die. Is that what Barthes meant when he said that he saw nothing in photographs but death? My challenge then of making creative works capable of exploring these ideas and of creating work which satisfied me but at the same time of finding an audience for whom this work resonates.

Out of these thoughts, I wondered about texture. Not just the texture in photographs but also the raw texture involves in life and which during stressful parts of life we exposed to the frayed edges of such textures. This short piece and my words and images in this post will explore this idea. I spoke above of the threads of memory and I wondered about the texture of that thread. Would it be like woven thread or wool or a fine nylon or silk as used for medical sutures? This takes me all the way back to the beginning of this project when I looked at the medical scan. I can imagine this thread of memory might be like the neurons in the brain; a way of connecting memories which might otherwise seem unconnected. The neurons connect using chemicals to allow them to transmit with nearby neurons. The idea of chemicals made me think of the chemicals used for developing photographs and of the photo-sensitive emulsions painted onto the paper. How can any of us imagine two apparently unconnected thoughts or images might mean to anyone else? From this idea of thread, I wondered about my images and my attempts in imagining what liminal space might look and feel like and how to xpress emotion in this space. What might the texture of such a space be like? Do ideas and experiences have texture? In some of my previous test pieces, I used the texture of old plaster on my bathroom wall. I want to further explore this. I wonder how I might begin to express the textures of grief or anger or loss?

This is an image which serves as a good starting point for my thoughts and experiments here. The image shows an interpretation of the liminal space between life and death. This space is not a nice space. It not filled with muted pastels and soft comfort. It is not a space for the living so perhaps my images exploring idea of how the physical space is an exploration of being unwelcome and of explusion? The space exists within the concept of loss but is also tied up with memory. Physical space and real objects are part of memory hence the sense of the textire of real things such as the plaster with its colour variations, cracks and texture but more than that with its sense of what has happened in that space. The plaster is important because I wanted the liminal space to have depth and a sense of being anchored in what was once real even if I present this plaster wall with adjusted extreme filters and editing. In trial work above, I added an image of two children from an old photo album. The photograph is damaged and taped together and as an object has its own texture. My thoughts about texture and the thread of memory led me to wonder about the child and bringing different textures to my works.

My work above is from an earlier test piece. Does the graphic image of the shape of the cliff with the child on top have less impact than the image with the volume and texture of the cliff? is there more of a sense of the fall or of loneliness or the human ‘gasp’ at thought of a baby perched at the edge of death? How does the texture in one image versus the complete lack of texture in the other texture relate to the depth of memory and of loss?

I went on from here to produce some more images exploring objects and their relation to memory and loss.

This image makes use of knitted wool which I used having explored this idea in some collaborative work. I imagine this as being from a baby’s jumper made by elderly relative. The dead child sits reaching out or perhaps clapping their hands. I have added the text from the original album photograph as another layer of texture and meaning. We now know that image is of Baby Andrew. Does that layer of texture make the death of the child and the exploration of the space after death seem more poignant?

I had other ideas on expanding this idea by using the shiny surface of a card sent “in deepest sympathy” but wondered if this was too obviously signposting my meaning. My next image uses child’s toys and I present this using coloured tones. Again I have included the text from the original photograph although what I show actually misses out deeper detail in the text which I show in enlargement below. In such a simple slip where a detail can be overlooked and so the perception of memory changed.

The surfaces and textures I explore in these test pieces provide a way for memory to be attached to my images. A way of filling nothingness with a layer containing a message or a memory of what has been lost. The layers in the image stores hints of memory. Our interpretation of the memory might not be  real  but that doesn’t matter as when we are forgotten it is up to whoever picks up our images to reinvent a sense of the memory in an image as a new story. Does this then hint at the photograph itself as an object with texture and memory which contains information beyond what we can see?