EMILY WHITING

“Can a photograph or series of photographs make sense of loss? My mother’s death - and the strange wreckage of relationships left in her wake - has seeped into every aspect of my life, and certainly into the process of making images in times of quarantine. I find myself taking greater care and having more reverence for the act of observation, trying to capture the temporal, and seeing what emerges without having control over it. That which is physically proximate - the wind, the smell of pine trees, the fading light in a familiar room - is carrying me farther towards the visceral, the brutal, the beautiful.

I am interested in he alchemy of loss and reemergence, of separating and coming back into the world. The poems of Amy Clampitt, who wrote of ‘landscapes and untended memory’, lend words to what I am working through with my camera - dreams of being carried, returning where you came from, gradual clearing. All of those themes are here within the confines of home. I think of this passage:

‘Let the light pass, let the air circulate, let there be intervals for moving apart, for coming back together’”

JUNE 2020