Studies in Time and Distance
The strange months of the covid-19 pandemic often caused me to think about the idea of “the uncanny” or “das unheimlich”- which translates from the german not just as un-homely or sinister but the more insidious anxiety of the familiar becoming strange. During the first lockdown I spent some time at my childhood home, a place that I’ve known most of my life but rarely looked at objectively. Making pictures there as an adult and during this weird time, where home is simultaneously both refuge and prison, gave me an excuse to mark this time and explore my own understanding of it. Small temporary structures that I built in the space were an attempt to contain light or shadow in the same way that the photograph arrests time, a possibly therapeutic attempt to control my environment if only as a construct within an image. In paying attention to the house and how it’s spaces change over the day, it surprised me often with its strangeness and how details took on a new significance through the prism of a changed world.