A History of Vanishing

Currently in Production

I am unravelling my family. This is a personal investigation, piecing together fragments of the past through photographs, letters, diaries and family objects. My mother, who now has dementia, holds part of the story, but she is an unreliable witness.

For most of my life, I saw my mother as a victim of my father’s control and violence. As I began looking at what remained, I realised I had never seen the whole picture. I don’t know exactly how my father died. My mother says she doesn’t remember.

I return to family objects, the woods and the holiday house, making new images alongside the archive. Each photograph is another fragment, another clue, another attempt to understand a story that was never spoken aloud. The camera cannot give me the answers, but it allows me to keep asking the questions.

A History of Vanishing explores memory, domestic abuse and the stories families choose not to tell. Through portraits, still life and reconstructed scenes, I move between evidence and imagination, using photography to explore what remains when answers are out of reach. The work photographs not certainty, but the search itself.

The myths that shaped our family are beginning to collapse.

This is a journey of unearthing.