The Children

My mothers' death three years ago was a transformative event that made me re-evaluate my art practice. The work I made to deal with that loss, presented me with a strong need for a conceptual work expressed through a physical, almost artisanal, way of manipulating photographs. The project was heavily influenced by the tradition of effigies and their place somewhere between statues and corpses. For these larger-than-life portraits of myself and my siblings I decided to intercede at the printing stage and make the process three-dimensional. Photo-polymer plates allowed me to generate a raised form of the portraits that I transferred onto paper as rubbings using a large home-made black crayon composed of beeswax and charcoal. The resulting portraits attain a presence, though faint and appropriately haunting and every mark is also a testament to my own presence and action.