In re-processing damaged negatives worn on the soles of my parent’s shoes during repeat visits to my childhood home, which we loved and lost, I explore the volatility of memory and the unstable nature of the past/present and parent/child seesaw.
I grew up on a dairy farm in Southern Australia. Falling milk prices and rising maintenance costs meant that, in the shadow of bankruptcy, my parents were forced to sell everything and leave. This love and loss remains with me today.
Every month since December 2010, my parents have enacted a performative ‘homecoming’ on my behalf. Under my direction, they have revisited their former farm and, during these visits, worn on the soles of their shoes a selection of negatives I made at the farm in 2005. These negatives depict places where my parents took snapshots of me as a child. Wearing the negatives has imprinted their surface with local dirt and plant matter. Some negatives are so cracked and battered, they need to be pieced back together with tweezers. My parents then return the negatives to me, to re-process.
This series is thus a movement of reclamation, focused on the value of the family snapshot and its relationship to home and memory. Since I cannot work the land of the farm with my hands, I work it through the tread of my parents. The motivation for this work stems from a longing for an idealized version of place. I simultaneously remember, depict, and fantasize. The chasms and scratches on the negatives become breaks in reality: they mythologize a holy land, an inheritance I am owed.