POLES APART
When my Father died he left behind an album of photographs of his life in Poland before he came to England, and before I was born. He never spoke of his former life, traumatically cut short in 1939, and he never returned to his homeland.The photographs in the album represented people to whom I was intimately connected (cousins, aunts, uncles), but would never know or meet. They were a completely obscured part of my own history. "Poles Apart" was made as a cathartic acknowledgement of that process of loss and unknowingness which is a part all of our lives to some degree.
Bundles of photographs bound with copper wire were submerged in a tank of saline solution through which an electric current was passed between positive and negative poles, causing the copper to erode and the photographs to oxidize and randomly decay. Once dried the photographs were presented in grid form on the gallery wall, where the remaining traces of copper salts continued to erode the images.
When my Father died he left behind an album of photographs of his life in Poland before he came to England, and before I was born. He never spoke of his former life, traumatically cut short in 1939, and he never returned to his homeland.The photographs in the album represented people to whom I was intimately connected (cousins, aunts, uncles), but would never know or meet. They were a completely obscured part of my own history. "Poles Apart" was made as a cathartic acknowledgement of that process of loss and unknowingness which is a part all of our lives to some degree.
Bundles of photographs bound with copper wire were submerged in a tank of saline solution through which an electric current was passed between positive and negative poles, causing the copper to erode and the photographs to oxidize and randomly decay. Once dried the photographs were presented in grid form on the gallery wall, where the remaining traces of copper salts continued to erode the images.