Beyond the Viewfinder: From Origin to Trace

This essay describes the final body of work produced during my MFA research. The return series explores the subject of personal memory by referencing family photographs to create painted works on paper. Incorporating certain aspects of the photographs while omitting others, the paintings oscillate between the familiar and the unknowable. It is this concurrence of intimacy and distance, and the potential this combination holds for evoking a particular type of desire, that are the driving concerns of this research. Questions related to what is being re-membered are addressed through themes of the ‘original’, absence, and spirit animals as well as through the formal techniques of tracing and layering. I am intrigued by the capacity for certain images to engender a visceral impact that is similar to the experience of memory; to discuss this aspect of my work I refer to Roland Barthes’s notions of the studium and the punctum. To discuss the potency of absence as a strategy to cultivate a sense of longing, I examine the work of painter Brenda Draney. In relation to the implications that are inherent to missing faces, I consider the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Thinking through the simultaneously intimate and distant, I also situate my work in relation to American poet Susan Stewart’s meditations on the “souvenir”. Fascinated by the ability for paintings to hover between states, I discuss the gap between the visible and the signified with reference to Jaques Rancière and through the enigmatic work of painter Ben Reeves. To further my understanding of some of the ways in which memory’s mercurial and archival nature can be invoked, I look at painter Angela Grossmann’s use of layering and at the creation of imagined contexts of origin in the work of photographer Augusta Wood. I intend for my work to generate an experience of partial recognition, the incompleteness of which echoes the fragmentary construction of memory and provokes in the viewer a longing for connection. Through the process of editing and embellishment, I move across time, the question of what is being recollected revising itself along the way.