FINDING HOME SERIES
1400 photo installation
15000mm x 2000mm
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With my Finding Home series I wanted to show the idea of experiencing a new place for the first time and how over time our memory of that place builds up, it grows and expands, what becomes long term and what becomes short term and is forgotten/left behind; but also how overwhelming a new experience can be with the amount of new memories that could flooding in. For the work I went out into Worcester an area I had just moved to, with little knowledge of, documenting my journey as I explore and build my memory of the place.
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With my first piece for a series of 8 days I took photos of everything I saw, my camera in front at eye level set to take an image every couple of seconds. After the walks each day I would then go through the images and delete the ones I could not remember experiencing on these walks. This way over the set of days you would visually see how my memory grew of each place as depicted by each photo column, going from 92 photos in day one to 240 photos in day 8. After this period of time I was left with 1400 photos that I could remember, a small percentage of how much I actually experienced. to show this overwhelming quality I decided to display all of the photos together as a mass but each attached to the wall with a low quality adhesive, this way the photos would gradually fall off of the wall replicating the process I went through myself. After time becoming a visual representation of that process, with day one having a large mass of fallen photos underneath and little on the wall and the last day having a little mass of photos underneath with many of the wall. Showing how my memory of this place has grown in scale over time.
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With my second piece I used my photos from the first piece of work to create another similar experience of memory in a new place. this time round instead of focusing on how the experience builds up it depicts the idea that the longer you experience a place the more we understand and get used to it, how at first it can feel quite overwhelming and hazy, you get easily lost in it; but over time you learn more about the area and it all becomes clear.
To create this I took every photo from my photo piece and layered the first photo of each day over the top of one another then the second, third etc. This meant as the video progressed the image would gradually get clearer and clearer, at first uncertain to what you are looking at then gradually as the video progresses you start to notice outlines, the image becomes clearer, you start to understand where you are and what you are looking at. To add to this clearing up I also had a sound recording taken from each day of walking, corresponding the length of sound recording to the length of images from each day. Allowing the idea of the new experience to be enhanced by more stimulation of the senses, however still lacking as it is simply a replication of a new experience, not the experience itself.
