When both my parents had passed away, I was faced with clearing our 50 year old family house. Not only did it feel that I was emptying an ocean with a spoon, but also that I was peering through a magnifying glass to look into their past and… mine.
So many objects, instruments, time-pieces, cloths, books, personal papers, vintage photographs, floating family stories, feelings and memories, weaved together and inspired me to create this series of images.
Belongings that were left abandoned and disconnected from their owners and their uses, conjured up for me the work and interests of my ancestors. Fabrics and clothes expressed my family’s culture and art of living.
Daguerreotype photographs of great grandparents dating back to the late 1800s and other old photographs gave evidence of the historical moments they had witnessed, to their lifestyles and their achievements. Books they had read that brought back to my mind dinner-table discussions and family values. Personal mementos from my own childhood and adolescence that even I had left in my parental house, testified to my own still incomplete separation.
The procedure contributed to my evolving understanding of my family’s past, the relationships forged amongst its members and their own experiences. A personal journey of transformation and realizations.
Photographing my meanderings through these inherited belongings, helped me to proceed through the path of mourning, of accepting and of letting go…