Well done Penny
This personal project addresses the fragility of materiality and the challenge of representation. Documents, birth certificates, reports, records punctuate our existence. This archive attempts to represent our legacy, delineating our future, forming and shaping our past and future narrative. Well done, Penny, co-opts my school archive. In an attempt to purge the document of magic, I am reducing it to its materiality, an object, simply ink on paper.
Fragments of self-portrait, inspired by Helena Almeida’s, Inhabited Canvas, 1976 reject traditional notions of self-portraiture (Filipa Oliveira, cited in Almeida 2009:7), instead embracing the image and archive as emotional, "talismanic" objects (Sontag 2008:12). Through torn, stapled, deteriorated paper and bleeding ink, these gestures and marks perform as a metaphorical response.
Time attempts to separate us from the present, we can look back from a privileged perspective aware of how the story ends. Photographs and handwritten documents, in contrast, exist in uncertainty, speculating without foresight. These fragile records hold a singular reality, unable to predict the future. Yet, their physical presence evokes an emotional weight far beyond their delicate form, embodying society’s reverence for the document as a powerful, emotional object.
REFERENCES
ALMEIDA, Helena, and Kettle’s Yard . 2009. Helena Almeida: Inside Me. Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard. pp.7
SONTAG, Susan. 2008. On Photography. London: Penguin. pp.12
To view a work in progress of the intended photobook, please click the link below.
