Look At You Loving Me, 1997 - 2000
Photography, unique Silver Gelatine prints onto canvas, each sized individually
One of my earliest series of work, Look at you loving me, consists of differently scaled photographic works printed onto canvases using a photographic light sensitive emulsion. The surface of the printed canvas is then worked into with a variety of drawing materials such as chalk and charcoal. Both formally and conceptually, these works reference painterly media while firmly being rooted within the language of photography.
Working with my mother over a period of four years, around 40 different unique works came into existence, charting both a very particular body, its expressions and gestures, and a relationship – that between mother and daughter, between model and photographer. The work aims to raise questions on contested notions of beauty in our ageist societies. What bodies can beauty reside in and be attributed to? Do we out-grow and out-live physical beauty or can an older body hold different aesthetic qualities?
Over those years, forms of participation and collaboration were initiated and explored to find methodologies that speak about portraiture as a project of relations. Making my mother fully complicit in the production of each image, asking her to take responsibility and agency for her portrayal was an important point of departure for all subsequent projects.