lONEly

This project was created during the first year of my Masters Degree in Photography.

This project uses photography to portray lived experience and inner emotions. The work centred on the challenges of my daughter as she struggled with the unusual challenges of isolation and lockdown as well as the time worn challenges of puberty and growing up.

Within this work I used staged photography and often layered compositing to produce images that are often highly planned and considered yet on the whole my goal is to create images that are possible, or nearly possible to have been observed.

My aim was to depict her world through staged imagery, to create visual representations of the worlds children find themselves in.

Concepts explored within the project are: increased reliance on digital devices for social connections; increased reference to imaginary friends; and the nightmare that was ‘home-schooling’.

I hope that through creating these visual representations and metaphors adults may better comprehend and understand the challenges this generation of children are now going through, and that children may use the resulting images as an outlet for describing or reflecting on their own experiences.

Hide and Seek (2020)

Emma plays in the garden with her imaginary friends.

It is September 2020 and she has not had physical contact with a real child for 7 months.

Through The Looking Glass (2020)

With her back to the window Emma's only valued connection to the real world outside is through the iPad.

FaceTime brings the voices and faces of her friends into her room but they lack depth, the touch is cold.

The Music Lesson (2020)

The joy of playing music is performance for others. Emma's piano teacher dials in for their half hour weekly lesson.

Later Emma records a piece she likes and sends it to a friend by text.

(Inspired by Vermeer's work of the same name this image casts Emma as a prisoner going through weekly rituals but with joy and serendipity removed.)

At Night They Come (2020)

As lockdown continues it becomes more difficult to sleep.

Stories of illness and dying in the outside world heard on the news in the day creep into thoughts at night.

Forever Autumn (2020)

Inspired by Jim Henson's 'Labyrinth' and Victor Flemming's Wizard of Oz, this image depicts the disorienting experience of a seemingly endless lockdown.

Children feel trapped in a maze where the rules keep changing and over which they have no control.

My Feet Itch (2021)

This image explores the challenges of physical change, body image and self-perception during the onset of puberty.

Mondays (2021)

Pencils (2021)

This image was inspired by my daughter's confession that when she gets angry she will often grab a pencil and grip it as if to break it. On two occasions the pencils actually snapped.

We made this image to consider the collective feeling that lots of tiny 'angers' can have upon us. Often it is not one thing that causes us to feel upset or anxious and we may struggle to fix that which we break.

Home School (2021)

This image depicts the depersonalising experience of home schooling. it explores how the constant shift from parent to teacher disrupts the parent/child relationship rendering them, in the eyes of the child, as neither of those personas and instead a source of anxiety and stress.

I’d Rather Have Flounder (after Sally Mann) (2021)

Underworld (2021)

Spring (2021)