The Case of Milltree Park

 Absence

“The state in which something expected, wanted or looked for is not present or does not exist.”

 

I approach my subject matter from the perspective of myself as a child existing in a state of maternal deprivation, parentification and secrecy as well as my present self, questioning all of these things with consideration of the elapse of time and its dilution of the severity of these events.

 

Rebecca Solnits writings are of significance in my initial navigation of my studio practice and I frequently return to selected extracts I have found I resonate with in some capacity both literally and conceptually.

 

“There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever…Whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Their mental landscape is like that of a medieval painting: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of the distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel." (Extracted from Pg.39 of Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A field guide to getting lost’)

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This series is heavily informed by confessional art, focusing on an intentional revelation of the private self as I expose the inner happenings of a very confidential childhood home and the controversial methods that were used within it , particularly unsolicited surveillance and humiliation tactics. I present my final body of work in the form of an investigative case of these tactics, suggesting the pronounce of guilty by display of questionable immoral behaviour and subsequently of inadequate living conditions for a child, providing evidence of such.