WITH EDGES LIKE GLASS:
Shattered Celluloid, With Edges Like Glass, Cutting Into My Fingers.
These works began as a collection of photographs not my own. Hundreds of 2x2 inch photographic slides, passed to me by chance on the last day of a house clearance.
I knew, upon receiving them, that they were to be a partial archive - the owner’s family having already removed any photographs of personal significance. Stripped of their original narrative, the remaining images felt detached, anonymous. Yet, within their new-found anonymity I saw an opportunity to reimagine them, to renew the status of these discarded transparencies as something worthy of being looked at.
In doing so, I subjected these fragile shards of film to multiple cycles of physical, chemical, and digital manipulation before fixing them to a new medium of canvas and expanding them to more than one hundred times their original size.
In this new form - more akin to painting than photography - they are harder to box away, harder to ignore.