Explore the profiles of this year’s graduating class.
Polly Shave
Flowers of the Field-An Inherited Archive
“On many of the pages, in faint pencil, was my Grandmother’s distinct handwriting. “Saponaria, Suffolk Roadside, Framlingham, 1960.”, “Meracuralis, garden, Constable Road, Ipswich, 71.”. Plants pressed, dried and delicately preserved between the pages. I pick one up, and a small leaf crumbles into my hand and decorates the page with dust.”
Fossils are indexical traces of objects that once existed, animal or vegetable tissue now become stone. A photograph, like a fossil, becomes witness to the life of the object. Using Gilles Deleuze’s metaphor of the “radioactive fossil” to point towards an image that embodies a past that is incommensurable with the present the image depicts.
A photographic response to an inherited archive of my grandmother’s amateur botanical illustrations-exploring preservation, representation and relationship. Using flowers from my mother’s garden, the work becomes a new combined archive of family work.
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