Memory Theatre

My grandmother who lived in Australia passed-away over Christmas and this prompted me to look at a video recording of her last visit to England some 15 years ago. Eight minutes and forty-three seconds, this is what I had left of her life. I was drawn to a section, at around two minutes in, a hand held chopped up sequence that grabbed my attention. In it our whole family poses for a photograph gathered around our Nan in the garden. The family moves around directing each other in the hope of creating the perfect image to mark this occasion. It struck me as an invaluable insight to what hides behind the photograph.

The next day I took one of my trips to Northampton and revisit that garden. No one was there and it had overgrown with a wild beauty, I caught the sun eclipsing this space with my digital video camera. Birds and the gentle hum of the nearby motorway provided the soundtrack to this moving image. When I got back to the edit suite I mapped the handheld footage over images of the garden now, scattering the fragmented memories throughout. This allowed me to place the present in the past elongating the absence.