Movement from one place to another

After having created 50 postcards and going through my visual archive of pictures I realised that none of the pictures I was working with were of or in the house I’m currently living in. This is one of the things I wanted to highlight in my project. When looking for things that have found me comfort, they didn’t come from my current place at all. In 8 months of living in this house I have not once decided to take a picture of my surroundings. Instead, all of my images that I had originally chosen came from the past and were photographed in my old flat.

The fact I hadn’t taken any pictures at all reflects on how I feel about not being in a visually or mentally comforting environment. I had to move out of my old flat with someone I had lived with for 3 years and into a house of five where I only loosely knew one person. The house itself is an old Victorian house that is literally falling apart. When we had mice, the inspection officer who came in noted that all of the houses built in the same time ours was have already been knocked down and ours is the last one standing. We have mould in the house, a basement that’s padlocked shut by our landlord and countless other issues wrong with it. The fact that I haven’t taken any pictures at all is probably because I don’t really want to save the moments lived in this house or even the memories kept in this place. This is something I’m only just coming to terms with now as I hadn’t even noticed until doing this exercise. It’s something I’ve done unknowingly but in the past 8 months I’ve felt so drained and detached from the house and the place I live in so I’ve tried to block these feelings out by focusing on things that don’t involve the house.

As I’m trying to convey emotion, distance, separation, and discomfort, I figured I would have to start taking pictures of my current house I live in. I tried to communicate transitioning from one place to another. After having taken pictures I then combined and layered old pictures with pictures of my new place to show movement from one place to another.

I also experimented with sketching items of my old flat onto acetate and then layering the acetate over photographs of my current house.