My Fugue (Dear Darkness) series forms part of my research into echolalia and the family narrative. Echolalia is an involuntary reflex that involves the repetition or echoing of an utterance from another person. I am concerned with the impulse most people have to repeat family stories and the pattern, repetition and slippage that exist in the retelling of the family narrative.
In these works I have sought to capture the emotive echolalic moment by simulating a record of the reflexive experience to repeat a story. I was intrigued with the idea of what the experience of an echo might look like if you were able to capture it and freeze it just at the crest point of remembrance. What does it look like to be immersed in this way?
The photographs are portraits that have initially been altered through digital layering with images of landscapes and organic material, producing second generation images that have been immersed in water and physically frozen inside a block of ice. Simulating the echo, I re-photographed the portraits inside their block of ice using movement and blur. As a result the images appear marked, stained and blurred.
They are an allegory for the immersive experience of being caught in the echolalic moment.