Marjolaine Ryley - Statement

My work explores ideas of memory, history, familial relationships and archival narratives. My practice uses photography, super 8, digital video, text, objects and found photographs to explore a range of themes and issues that look at linking my own personal experiences to broader social and political narratives.   My work moves between the personal album and the social document.

Throughout my work there is a strong interest in history and memory both of the individual family and its relation to wider culture. Working with multiple images, grid structures and the book format, allows me to explore the temporal and transient, the indexical and the archival nature of photography. The moving image work brings together past narratives with present places, conflating the two as documentary evidence, while the still images cumulatively narrate familial histories, relationships, exiles and returns.

The images in the series Résidence Astral are all taken in my grandmother's apartment, an archetypal bourgeois dwelling in Brussels. I have visited her from early childhood and have documented the apartment since 1993 on regular visits from England with my mother.   The images explore the interactions between people and space, capturing the psychological charge of the domestic environment.

I am interested in the duality of experience within the familial realm that encompasses the closeness and comfort, as well as claustrophobia and ambivalence that we may feel towards members of our family. By photographing in an intimate way, magnifying my view, I explore my feelings towards my mother and grandmother, documenting the creases of clothing, wrinkles of skin, textures of home and the very fabric of life itself.   The images investigate what it is that makes the family so unique; that we may both long for, and abhor the intimacy it offers.

"The photograph makes a promise of history it cannot keep. There is certainly a sense in which the disarticulated fragments to which so may post war artists have been drawn can be read as a metaphor for the unruly processes of memory and the traumatising of historical continuity. Indeed there are strong parallels between photography's emphasis on incidental details and the involuntary memory fragments that are the raw materials of psychoanalysis. It is a matter of putting the parts together and inserting them into language: a task that is left to the viewer of the photo fragments." (1)

www.marjolaineryley.co.uk