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>> Mary Ellen Bartley |
Odette England Click here to visit the artist's website >>
Artist Statement Twenty-two years later, Mum and Dad performed a kind of homecoming on my behalf. Every month for one year, from December 2010, they revisited our former family farm, wearing on the soles of their shoes a set of negatives I had made at the farm in 2005, when I took photographs of places where they had made snapshots of me as a child. As my parents walked the farm, the negatives became abraded and imprinted with local dirt and debris. The negatives were then returned to me, some so damaged they had to be pieced together with tweezers. Thrice Upon a Time is a movement of reclamation and transcription. Since I cannot work the land with my hands, I work it through the lens, and allow it to work the lens too, in a sense, through the tread of my parents. The dominant motive for this work is my longing for an idealized vision of home, for the sake of which I remove my parents’ agency, much as I feel my own agency removed. The resulting images mythologize my holy land, an inheritance I ache for. My parents are semi-supervised ghosts; I ask them when and where to haunt. Their repetitive, ritualistic motion helps me remember, depict, and fantasize. Artist Bio She is a two-time UK winner of the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Emerging Photographers competition and has achieved wins and honorary mentions in the Px3 De La Photographie Paris competition; the London International Creative competition; and the International Photography Awards. Most recently, she is the recipient of the Hotshoe Magazine Photofusion Award (2010) and the CENTER $5000 Project Launch Award (2012). England is represented in the United States on the East Coast by KLOMPCHING GALLERY.
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