The Weaving

Reaching my 40th birthday, I began to think about my mum and how different our lives were at this juncture. I began to experiment with a collection of family photos of my mum. In the photos she is mostly between the age of 18 and 22, one much later when she must have been almost 37-40 that I took as a child. I was especially drawn to certain gestures in which I saw something of myself. I wanted to re-create the feeling of each gesture. The two images together (past and present) are a strange paradox because at the moment of capture, I am older than she. I decided to concentrate on the creative act of weaving the prints together, re-performing this for the camera and using the images as a record of the performance. What follows is a response to the experience of looking through the archive, how I felt and how the photos and memories triggered an act of creation. Through this, I hope to spark questions in the viewer’s mind about the role of the mother in creating identity, and the process by which we create re-experience memory and create an internal narrative. [Presented as a grid]