Dough as flesh

I’ve had illness after illness, crisis after crisis, including writing my dissertation which has taught me how easily you can become a hermit when there’s so many words to write. 🙂 These images are some more experiments, baking and experimenting how dough could be flesh. I’ve also been doing some writing apart from my dissertation which I’ve put a little glimpse of below. Let me know what you think, I love hearing others thoughts. 🙂

Just one thing stands between us.
Part mother, part child, part other.
Like the spare pastry left once the gingerbread child has been cut out. All that holds us together seems to be the apron strings tied above my waist.

Jasmine Gauthier

Kaylynn Deveney + Albert Hastings Inspiration

After thinking about it, I realised that Kaylynn’s series on the life of Albert Hastings has had a great impact on me personally as well as my photography in the last couple of years. It is no secret that I love to photograph my grandparents and I’m fascinated by our relationship with one another, as well as how different/similar our lives are. Since moving to the UK they have always lived fairly close and been a huge support to me. They are the people who taught me that art is for life, and that you never stop being an artist inside and that will stay with me forever.

Kaylynn’s Website: http://www.kaylynndeveney.com/

But enough of my sentimental soppy paralleling, I was lucky enough to see Kaylynn’s work in a show in Gallery of Photography, Dublin (http://www.galleryofphotography.ie/exhibitions/bealtaine.html). The images which I am quite familiar with were so delicate and small. I’m so used to seeing them in a screen that my mind was fascinated in seeing a real print of the images. Then on a course recently, someone brought the book in and the love for the work was rekindled again! I first saw the work when I was in college a few years ago, and I did my own “version” of her work, which to be fair was a direct copy of her style. Of course this was used predominantly as research into a topic I was already fascinated with. So here is my “After Kaylynn Deveney” work.

What others and I found so interesting about my own attempt to narrate my grandparents daily life was the differences between them and how they came together to form one. My grandmother’s captions were thoughtful, often fairly long and whimsical, whereas my grandfather’s were short, blunt and scientific. Just in asking them to write about the images I took, it could tell you so much about them without even meeting them!

I love that about photography, for example in just this image I took of them 2 years ago. It’s a fairly long exposure, enough for my grandmother to read, open and close her paper at a normal speed. Probably about 10-20 seconds long. With that you can see my grandfather didn’t seem to move an inch, which is very much like his character. It’s a wonderfully telling portrait of the both of them and I like to call it, The Conversation.

Another photograph I took very recently of them on my Bronica, which many of you have seen, is below. This image, without me even recognising it, echoes the image above but in a completely different way. I wanted it to be portraits of them individually but together in the same frame.

So to wrap it all up, I hope to continue to take a leaf out of Kaylynn’s book and explore this interesting side of life. I realise this has been one of my longest blog posts but if you’ve made it this far in reading it all then I commend you and I’d love to hear what you thought so just drop me a comment!