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Abstract
This research paper documents three bodies of work that comprise the studio
component of my Master of Fine Arts (MFA): HomeWork (2011), Carry me Home
(2011) and All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 – 2014).
The third work also lends its title, in part, to that of this paper – All My Father’s Houses.
The works are underpinned by a personal family narrative that, used as a pivot, relates
critical theories of place, memory, migration and the archive. Importantly, the
relationship between these ideas and my creative practice is created through a
personal history of migration, both voluntary and forced, historical and ongoing.
This research was motivated by the actuality of loss and failure within private and
public archives and the realisation that memory—and with it an important connection to
place—will one day too, be lost. Provoked by these ideas, this work is a response to
imagistic desires; it aims to translate experiences of memory into photographic form
where, through representation, they can be possessed and made portable.
Contingent on the unpacking of a mobile migrant journey, notions of home, how we
establish it and our sense of belonging within it, are questioned and clarified. Woven
through these discussions is Marc Augé’s notion of place as a geographically bounded
site in the real world and Lucy Lippard’s emotionally invested theories of place and the
local. I further explore the relationship between my mobile migrant experience and
notions of place and home by linking to John Di Stefano’s suggestion that the concept
of home might be best understood through the experience of journey.
As a consequence of lost archives, this research has, by necessity, become a
negotiation between memory, the archive, photography and place. Originating from a
desire to give visual form to childhood memories, All my father’s houses: a catalogue
by a builder’s daughter (2011-2014) proposes that photography can be used as a site
for the production and representation of memory, one that is future-oriented and active
in the construction of portable notions of place.