I’ll Be Seeing You
2019 - 2020
I’ll Be Seeing You is a multidisciplinary project exploring the first year of living without my mother, Teena, who died suddenly in February 2019. Our close and yet complicated relationship suddenly became frozen in time, leaving me to explore several creative avenues in an attempt to remain connected to someone that was no longer present.
Inspired by my mother’s love for her garden, many of the works begin with botanicals at their core. From the final rose picked in my mother’s garden, to the symbolism of ferns as new beginnings, the cyclical nature of life and death weaves its way throughout these pieces in a way that honours both an ending and new beginning. The loss of her life but the beginning of mine as a motherless child.
Originally commissioned by Ort Gallery and made over a ten-month period, the work encompasses a number of process driven creations that grapple with experimentation, scale and [im]permanence. A collection of botanical sun prints — deliberately chemically unfixed — will slowly fade and transform as they continue to expose in the sunlight. A series of images produced from silver nitrate and fixed on to aluminium will slowly rust and fade over time. A single microscopy image of my grief tears symbolises an attempt to map out my journey of grieving at a cellular level, whilst large scale self-portraits provoke existential questions around the cosmological makeup of our bodies.
Exhibited:
Mother, Ort Gallery, February — March 2020
Commissioned by:
Thank you:
Thank you to George Chennell & Hannah Creeney from The Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute for their support and expertise in producing the microscopic image of my tears.
