cutting and fragmenting

Cutting and fragmenting images is a recurring process in my work, informed by my experience of disability and by a peripatetic childhood, living in 7 countries before the age of 15.

I worked with archive photographs for the first time in 2000, in my final piece for Adorn,Equip, Leicester City Gallery’s groundbreaking exhibition about disability equipment. In the Science Museum’s storage building in Olympia, London, I discovered a collection of glass plate photographs taken in 1911 by a prosthetist, a maker of artificial limbs. They show his clients posed in front of a painted backdrop, their clothes carefully arranged to reveal and display their various prostheses.

I digitally cut out the prostheses from the portraits and exhibited them separately, in a series called Beautiful Pictures, as part of my installation called The Aesthetics of Prosthetics.

In the family portraits shown previously, the people gaze outwards, meeting our gaze. In these portraits the subjects hide their faces, or turn away, or avert their eyes.

In Matthew Stone’s Art Salon, we discussed the significance of the intention behind a piece of work. The intention behind the prosthetists's photographs is to advertise his product. The people hide their faces and turn away because the photographs are not portraits of them: the artificial limbs are the subject of the photographs.

Only one of the subjects broke away from this de-personalisation; it is this young man, who turned his head to look at us, at some point during the photograph’s long exposure.