[This Is Not] An Archive of Me

Note: This is work I produced on my MA a few months ago. I've not shown it outside of that context until now, and probably won't show the vast majority of the work at all as it was, in the truest sense, a personal project.

"[THIS IS NOT] AN ARCHIVE OF ME" came about initially as a result of the desire to examine the notion of a contemporary archaeological artefact. Contemporary archaeology has been a consistent influence on my work for the last few years; predominantly in the form of a documentary style.

I saw this as an opportunity to work in a different mode, and settled on still life as the basis of my methodology.

It seemed to me that the most obvious angle of attack for this subject and methodology was through the archive, so I decided to create an "archive of me". Through that I could try to understand what artefacts might be from my own life by photographing objects that were either directly from, or at least represented, particularly formative moments from my past.

Using some of the tropes of archaeological artefact photography - flat lighting, featureless backgrounds and labels - I hoped to present these objects in a way that echoes objectivity.

I paired each of these images with some prose directly related to the "moment" in my life that the image represented. Through the juxtaposition of text and image I tried to create a gravitational pull between the artefacts and the memories, such that by the end it might be concluded that the memory is the artefact.

However, memory is clearly subjective; in and of itself it cannot be used as definitive proof. It is notoriously unreliable, which is one reason why I added [THIS IS NOT] to the beginning of the title. The archive is unreliable (van Alphen 2014) and therefore must be questioned; one brought to life by my own memories must be considered doubly unreliable.

Addendum: I am still unsure if I'll ever show all of the work from this piece. It was incredibly personal and I found it difficult rehashing old memories from my much younger years. This is as exposed as I get really, and I'm unwilling as yet, to go much further.

I've removed the prose for now, as I want to remove that element of my lived experience from the work. Images like the face-mask one, have a meaning that I suspect we all share, but perhaps the others can take on a new life unburdened by my baggage.

In the end, the work is intended as a way for my now-grown child to understand me in later life in a way that I wish I had in relation to my own father. Perhaps that's where it stays.