16 photographs
Inkjet Prints
Various dimensions
My photographic work And She Said She Was Looking explores the poetics of childhood, of
innocence, memory and loss and raises questions surrounding personal, family and cultural
identity. The immediate backdrop for this work is formed from my experiences growing up in
a small, southern Moravian village, my family's place for generations.
My pictures reconstruct fragments from my past and place them within the present. Experiences,
memories and reveries from my childhood are filtered through an emotional process of
recollection and translation. My work takes place at the intersection between the real and the
imaginary: between truth and fiction, between memory and forgetting.
The aim of this photographic work is to explore family, its many complex representations and
the ways family memory and its absence takes hold within ourselves and shapes the present.
The archive of recollections from which I must draw upon includes old photographs, letters and
other material traces from my family's past. Together, these things oscillate between the real
and the imaginary.
In these photographs my memory blends, diffuses into the memories my mother has of her
childhood. The site of this encounter takes place in my mother's first home, in the shadow
(and fear) of her grandmother. I grew up in this same house and like my mother, lived alongside
my grandparents. Years later and since the death of my beloved grandfather and grandmother
the house remains but has changed like all once living things do. Loss grips the walls. It is a
lonely place now—yet filled with traces that help me unravel the past.
I use photography because at its most powerful it combines the fictive with the descriptive: the
cinematic with the documentary; fiction and the imaginary infused with the truth.