John Kippin - Statement

Background

My father died in 2002. Since that time, I have made a body of work that in some way responds to both my feelings towards my father and my recollections of him and consequentially, to places which that I respond to as particularly invoking his memory, The journey that I have undertaken is a complex one and crosses an area that is located between memory and the association of places as opposed to the existential and actual properties of real spaces. It is also, in some ways, becomes about the representation of absence through the photograph, challenging its documentary and indexical properties and conferring the photograph with the function of the reliquary. On reflection, I have made a series of 'memory based' landscapes.   By constructing these 'landscapes', I have attempted to link the process of making the work as a point of departure between the image (as relating to the places that I recall through my father) and the wider more objective currency of the images as relating to a kind of photographic landscape practice. The resulting images act as a counterpoint to my earlier work in this area. My hope is that I have been able to create a broad and shared understanding regarding death and loss, reflecting upon the relationship of the living to the dead by entering a discourse between the metaphorical life of the landscape and the human experiences of memory with regard to its relationship with the materiality and ephemera of rememberance.

Memory and Landscape

Our experience of place is conditioned through not only through our direct physical engagement with it but also by bringing an appreciation of its context and history. Our own subjectivity is challenged by this information as we construct interpretations that are based on our experiences and intentions. We are then able to construct and to believe in what the artist Paul Nash referred to as its genius loci. Within this context, what is possible, are images that explore spaces and places through the shifting mirror of memory, particularly with regard to the phenomenology and 'psychological -geography' of the landscape. By placing the reading of the work reading within the context of personal lived and remembered experience, an engagement with the collective memory of society in the round is invoked with regard to the representational properties and possibilities of the camera .

Much photography is by its nature elegiac and melancholic. Since its 'invention' it has always been associated with rememberance, but this is focussed on the representation of the deceased or celebrated with regard to the knowledge of their relationship to the owner of the photograph, there being no real need to engage within the much wider context of collective rememberance. Recent research suggests that our memories set achievement targets and expectations for our later lives. The photograph is essentially eternally representing and referencing the past, which it (more or less successfully) projects into the present. The real potential of this process is, however, that it is an investment for the future that carries with it its own potential for continuous interpretation, knowledge, reflection and rememberances.