No individual can claim total independence from another human. Isolation is myth, no matter how much we might desire it, attain it, or have it forced upon us. We are connected and interconnected in the broadest of terms and the most intimate and primal.
Society, culture, community, friendship, organisation, experience, humanity. Family.
No one in the human race is formed without the integral presence and influence of another being. We are eternally the receivers and the givers of identity. In light of this, we each play a liable role in the formation of the people in our lives, just as we are formed in turn by those same people. Whether nurtured, neglected, abandoned, surrounded, enriched, depleted, abused, valued, entitled, challenged, loved or forgotten, we all form identity through connection to others.
Even the absence of another has indelible power to create.
This body of work explores these various facets of identity and it’s organic and fluid reality. I am analysing my own identity, and how I have instrumentally shaped my daughters; biologically, socially, spiritually and their view of the world. Yet there is recognition of my own shifting and shaping because of my daughters and the challenges and life they have created in me. Traditional thought might assume that the influencers of identity are those that have authority, a public voice, status. However, in an era of increasing media cacophony and the warping of human connection, perhaps it is the quieter things that have true power to form. A family holiday, meals at a table, the long road of parenting.
Finding the balance between the fully formed and the “yet to be” aspect of identity is reflected in the various treatments of the image. The wiping away of paint, the deliberate absence of areas of the body, the placement of the subject within an abstracted void, where the emergence of the face and figure with sharpening clarity depicts the gradual emergence of the individual.
Society, culture, community, friendship, organisation, experience, humanity. Family.
No one in the human race is formed without the integral presence and influence of another being. We are eternally the receivers and the givers of identity. In light of this, we each play a liable role in the formation of the people in our lives, just as we are formed in turn by those same people. Whether nurtured, neglected, abandoned, surrounded, enriched, depleted, abused, valued, entitled, challenged, loved or forgotten, we all form identity through connection to others.
Even the absence of another has indelible power to create.
This body of work explores these various facets of identity and it’s organic and fluid reality. I am analysing my own identity, and how I have instrumentally shaped my daughters; biologically, socially, spiritually and their view of the world. Yet there is recognition of my own shifting and shaping because of my daughters and the challenges and life they have created in me. Traditional thought might assume that the influencers of identity are those that have authority, a public voice, status. However, in an era of increasing media cacophony and the warping of human connection, perhaps it is the quieter things that have true power to form. A family holiday, meals at a table, the long road of parenting.
Finding the balance between the fully formed and the “yet to be” aspect of identity is reflected in the various treatments of the image. The wiping away of paint, the deliberate absence of areas of the body, the placement of the subject within an abstracted void, where the emergence of the face and figure with sharpening clarity depicts the gradual emergence of the individual.
