An artist working with film and audio, I explore the unstable relationship between memory, archive and identity. Using found and personal archive imagery, I construct complex film and sound works through an organic and intuitive approach where images, sounds, drawings and words intra-act to form shifting matrices of meaning.   

‘Intuition’ here functions not as a synonym for guesswork, but rather is enacted through considered, technical decision making. Fragments of film are digitised, spliced, reassembled, slowed down, obscured and repeated until they begin to generate new stories centred around women’s lives, and the way in which women take up space within their own lives. Drawing and audio both work with, and counterpoint, moving images; emerging and overlapping with each other physically and in the edit; forming an ecology of making where each element provokes, complements and unsettles the others.

My anti-linear, consciously ‘unstoryboarded’ plane of working encourages narrative to build emergently, allowing me to manipulate often fragile analogue material in ways which highlight both its vulnerabilities and its potential as a form of reanimation. I work with textures of image and sound which feel unstable or incomplete, using opacity and pauses to emphasise the gaps and absences within archival material. This allows space for the audience to enter the work and bring their own stories into dialogue with mine. 

Sound functions not just as an accompaniment to images, but reveals itself as a parallel narrative. I build layered soundscapes from the effects, ambient sound and fragments of voice and poetry I record; layers which sometimes respond to and sometimes lead the visual edit, pulling the images into unexpected rhythms and emotional about turns. 

I interrupt the archive by live drawing within a domestic space: projecting archive films onto a dining room wall and making marks over the projection on wallpaper. Attempting to capture the faces of the past in real time, I trace the gestures and forms which surface in the footage, recording the process as I do so and layering the results back into the edit. I find working in a domestic space to be a powerful statement for me – a declaration of agency.

The final pieces take on a form which resist closure. They act as conversations between generations, as conduits for difficult subjects, as poetic forms of resistance. Each viewing could reveal something different to the viewer. Each viewer could respond to different elements, finding commonalities of lived experience. My intent is to test and question intergenerational notions and assumptions within the context of class and shifting political landscapes. The significance of using the 1940s-1970s as a site of construction lies in its personal resonance: it was during this period that my grandmothers and my mother married and became mothers. My approach is informed by a feminist position which shapes the way I work, my relationship with the materials I work with and my critical engagement with the archive. Personal experience is interwoven, not as autobiography, but as a lens through which to create pieces which draw parallels and form symbioses between the private and collective female experience.