Sundays at Sea

1999-2000

This series of  photographic images combines my childhood family album images with geographic maps, letters,and other artifacts that reference issues of migration, home and the vernacular album.

 I grew up in Belfast, N. Ireland where I observed my handsome uniformed father sail in and out of my mother’s domestic life. His appearance provoked a ritual. We rushed to see who would be the first to open his sea trunk. Here the promise of exotic trinkets lay among a travel shaving kit, sewing supplies, a wallet of photographs and the crumpled white naval uniform worn in the tropics.  Through out my childhood, my father would mark these occasions by photographing us. By the time he retired, and finally came home, my mother, siblings and I had drifted on to our own lives.

In this work I am re-cycling vernacular photography and fragments of detritus that map out my relationship to my parents. Memory is instilled and resonates in the most banal objects and images. Through this investigation, I represent both a sense of longing and a sense of loss.

1999-2004