Development

I have begun to sew into photographs showing singular items from some of the collections that I was working with, with the stitches following the pattern of images of the entire collection and linked together as in some of the previous work. This was a way to reveal the link between the object and its collection, and to partially obscure the object from view, as its details can be obscured once it is placed within the context of this archive. I felt that using photographs pulled the practice back to the idea of archived material, as photographs feature largely in archives, and certainly in those of a personal and domestic nature; the family photo album being a primary example of this. This also took the practice element of the research further, as by printing the images of the memory objects as photographs, these physical photographs were becoming memory objects in themselves. Although this was also the case whilst working with printed designs on cloth, this did not reveal itself until the use of photographs was introduced. ‘The photograph infuses almost all levels of memory’ (Edwards, 2003:331) in its physicality, what the image it shows, what it represents to the viewer. These different elements of the physical and the visual cannot be separated, one does not exist without the other as ‘the image and the object [are] brought into a single coherent form’ (Edwards, 2003:331). This is very similar to how all personal memory objects work, in the sense that we cannot separate the object and the memory associated with it.