Museum

The archive of discarded images

Addresses the commodification of the experience of communicating with ‘wildness’ and ‘nature’. In returning to the archive of discarded images (still and moving images, object), for ecological and ethical reasons, it gives value to all images and considers the implications of visual representations which frame, subjugate and consume wildness.

The living Bird

Discourses of Photography 2018/2019, PHD with The Royal Collage of Art and The Victoria & Albert Museum, UK. (AHRC Fellowship)

The work delves into the figure of the wild bird as through an encounter between a museum - the Victoria & Albert Museum - and an archive - the photographic collection of the Word & Image Department at the V&A. The research asks why we select photographic images, how we write from photographic images and how we listen to what we see. It queries the photographic collection as a site of ‘live’ readings, writings and listenings to images. The research explores the ontology of the photograph in tracing the wild bird in the museum’s photography collection, and considers the relation between bird, photograph and writing as correlations of memory in an archive.

Bird Not Yet

Bird not yet … are a number of sculptural works, that seek to bring forward the ‘liveliness’ or restlessness within the photographic image and suggest that the photographic images moves through time in search of other ‘kin’. It is also an ecological lament to all common and hidden birds. Using the alchemic and scientific properties of early photography, the lost wax casting practices and the scientific flight (Bird in Flight) film inventions of Etienne-Jules Marey (1885 to 1890) - the sculptural forms reconfigure dead matter and organic matter from local urban and rural settings into the ‘live’ moment. When placed together these elements are reanimated to a live and restless state of, light shadow and movement.