General Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

Conversations with my mother is a series of burned, buried, stitched and embellished photographs in response to my second parent dying from cancer. I jostled with many personas during this experience - Wife, Daughter, Sister, Artist. I became Carer. The work I made here is my response to this. It is about who I am, who my mother was and the relationship between us; it is about resemblance, resentment, entanglement and reliance. It is about slippage. I photographed her when I was allowed. Sometimes I asked her to photograph me or I photographed myself responding to what was happening. Individual works are questioned and negotiated through my interventions I began during her illness and continued after she died: burning, stitching, concealing, embellishing, burying, painting and role-playing. I am concerned with the gesture of looking at my mother as she was - and the photograph's inadequacy in satisfying this need. Photographs are toxic reminders as well as nostalgic ones. This series was made reluctantly.