In the late summer of 2023 I was faced with the task of clearing the house in which my parents had lived for a quarter of a century.
Of course, in its still-furnished state it was a vessel for many memories. In deciding to make a record of it before it was returned to emptiness, it was unexpectedly obvious to me not only how I would record it but why I would do it that way.
This was not the first time I had made intentionally defocused images, but it was the first time that I instinctively knew that they reflected the nature of memory. The finer details lost, unimportant; just a residual feeling, a prompt that asks the viewer to keep something alive within themselves. A template which imparts a need to reinstate, or perhaps even reimagine, those missing parts.
These images are of course entirely personal: only my family and I could reconstruct a reality—each of us with our own version—in a truly meaningful way.
But this process crystallised in me an understanding that this process of bringing one’s own memory and imagination to any image is key to the value of that image. It was this that set me on a path of trying to create images which would interact similarly with any viewer, each reconstructing a reality: their own version of it.
