You are a British photographer in Italy who works in film and is now starting on an archival photo project. That sounds pretty amazing! Tell us more about your recent project!
I had been working on a PhotoVoice project with Nigerian refugees a couple of years ago and the whole experience really flipped a switch for me about how to go deeper into storytelling and the representation of mobility of trauma. My archive project started as a multi-disciplinary idea about using neuroscience research and photography when applied to trauma and memory. It was sometime later that I started working with my enormous family archive and realised it fit perfectly with the story I wanted to tell.
I did a lot of work this year on the mobility of memory, how it alters over time and how place specific memories can blend or co-exist in seemingly unrelated locations. Essentially the project has evolved into a Sensory Ethnography so that now I’m combining archive material with new images that I will create from the research to explore the materiality of recollection and in particular for what this means when studying the effects of childhood trauma in the domestic space.
What are you working on at the moment? And what made you want to make a go for it?
I made a short film for our Poetic Framing course, which is in keeping with the archival project, and I have the immense fortune to be coordinating a small team of animators to build on this existing idea and hopefully create a film that I can distribute through festival screenings. I was keen to push this topic because the focus is on domestic violence which is unfortunately a very current and growing endemic in society and yet remains a taboo. I’m hoping I can contribute something positive by generating awareness and creating more dialogue on the issue. I’m also now writing my first feature length fiction which I had started over five years ago and never finished. I’m hoping to receive a development fund and see what happens!