Lauren Wilson
I’m a Manchester based artist whose work ranges across printmaking, photography and conceptual art. The work shown here was created in the second half of my MA in Photography and was produced through the first government imposed national lockdown.
The work created explores multiple themes of interest, often in a fragmentary fashion. Themes explored throughout this work include the domestic space, materiality and objecthood. Lockdown forced us to change so many elements of our lives, including a drastic reduction in human interaction, highlighted responsibilities of “key workers” and our homes becoming multifunctional spaces. The changing function of my home and the acknowledgement of this made me want to explore my relationship with it. Using found photographs from family albums offered a physical connection to my surroundings and an indexical trace of a past time. This idea intrigued me and so my practice pursued how to interrupt these through physical and digital processes. Using physical techniques reflected ideology about how tactile activities bring joy during times of hardship. This can be reflected within the rise in popularity of hobbies such as walking, gardening and baking during lockdown. The pandemic also gave way to a new digital era of zoom calls and virtual environments. This loss of physicality was explored through digital software, combined with found family images, to investigate how layers and textures can be translated through the digital. Research into memory processes highlighted how tangents of thematic coherency within in family albums can create half-moments of recognition. This concept was explored when thinking of how to display my work. Showing different techniques on the same subject matter at first may appear chaotic and disruptive, but on further inspection recognitions and connections may be made.
