My recent works have focused on ideas around memory, memorialisation, mortality and identity. My background in psychology and personal experience led me to investigate emotions around loss and its ensuing grief and to try and make that universal human condition become part of a constructive dialogue.

I see death and the passage of time as a natural part of life and want to engage in ideas about the power of loss.

I see the process of making work as mimicking life, one works with gravity, time, connections and each moment can produce something different. My inspiration is the real world and the every day, ordinariness of the complex human condition.

When my work goes into the wider world and someone else engages with it that’s when I think the added magic of art happens.

I am inspired by ideas and the creative process itself and spend much time looking at works and writings by diverse artists and theorists. I’m particularly drawn to artists who use their personal experience as departure points for their work such as Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Christian Boltanski and Gerhard Richter…and I also find design and architecture influential informing my ideas around space, light and time.

I have been extremely fortunate to have worked closely with a like-minded architect and builder to realise my dream home/studio. As a result, the last few years my studio, an old mechanics’ garage, has provided the space and light to spread out and work on multiple projects, day and night. While this can be distracting especially when I need to privilege the work that has a deadline, I often use the distraction of other more manual work as respite. Music is on at these times, but ambient sounds are my preferred option when I need to focus.

I move to my study in the home part of my house/studio to work on the computer part of my practice where I tend to work into the night. I would summarize my studio practice as intuitive until there are deadlines and then I need my organised director’s hat to work efficiently in collaboration with people such as my master-printer, lighting experts, framers, carpenters and the like.

My next major exhibition, in a few months’ time, is such a site-specific installation, In My Mother’s House. I have transformed my late mother’s house into a gallery space with the principal room housing an immersive installation. On a large table I’ve randomly assembled her huge collection of glassware and through the use moving lights shadows emerge that envelop the darkened space, abstract patterns are created that glide along the walls and ceiling. A music piece accompanies this ‘dance’ adding another layer to the work. In another part of the house are photographic images of the abstracted shadows as well as a suite of symbolic still-life images of one delicate glass vessel in various states, as poetic metaphors for the way I see my mother’s life.

Invitations pending, coming out soon! (The admin part of my practice).

A project I’m involved in currently is photographing women from the South Sudanese community in their homes and specifically in their kitchen with the aim of giving them a voice that is very different form the mainstream view. This is a collaboration initiated by a community organization involving writers, chefs and another photographer.

I’m also always working in my studio on multiple personal works; ongoing works in progress, - making as therapy.

For example, my Covid experience inspired me to mark time through the collection of take away coffee cups and photographing the interior of these with its coffee residue simulating a petri dish or outer space vision. 70 cups and 70 images from the first lockdown and 116 cups and images from the second!

Another constant work is using text, writing with an electric dental drill to transcribe my countless diaries onto a large wooden tabletop that was a wedding present over 40 years ago
(I married a dentist who has since died).

Symbolic interpretations of materials and form are ever present in all my work.

Photographs: Theresa Harrison Photography
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