Georgia Mingham - Dead-Eye
Something that seems to sit so fake in my mind, fake like the love forced in front of me. Twisted, manipulated truths, just like the shit pagan theories left circulating these dead hallways. The thick smoke of incense sticks, something that was never before appreciated, something that I love, now chokes me.
Once a pulse of the tree breaks and disappears, so it is that the leaves fall and his soul empties and my mind fills. And with that, all other branches begin to break away, and this, this is what I am left with.
My work is based strongly on the ongoing changes around me, it is an expression and therapeutic way for me to come to terms with the changes in my life. From family to friends, old and new places, I continue to document the impermanency of the present becoming the past.
Employing multi-media visual processes to explore the boundaries and overlapping between the language of the personal family archive and contemporary photographic practise brings my work together. I critique the nostalgic expectations of the family photo album through editing methods and by creating additional new imagery that reinterprets and reflects on set domestic narratives.
My current body of work ‘Dead- Eye’ plays on the typically forced happy family photo album, showing imagery from personal family archives with additions of new reflective imagery and interpretations. It pieces together the realities of family life with focussing on the reality of events that no one likes to talk about. After my brother’s death in 2013, everything started to make a little more sense in my life. I began a process akin to a personal ‘butterfly affect’, where small details and events had a direct basing on the future, which formed into the project ‘Dead-Eye’. ‘Dead-Eye’ questions the old set placed memories told and seen within the family archive, in comparison to the way things are presently, in order to create a sense of Freud’s theory of *Phantasmagoria.
Families are never perfect. Memories are never fully truthful. So why do we try and corrupt ourselves with a false quality of happiness? Why do we stick in the structure of relationships, births, weddings, family holidays that seem so surreal, in that the past is real and immediately present. Where is the reality in all this? The arguments, the tears, the break ups, divorce, the deaths? The stuff we don’t want to talk about.
* Phantasmagoria: -Freud portrays the process of mourning as a passionate or hyper-remembering of all the memories bound up with the person we have lost. Mourning is represented as a dizzying phantasmagoria of memory.
Instagram: @gjmingham