Lines and Shadows

by Janie Nicoll, 12 Apr 2008

Lines and Shadows
I had food poisoning yesterday and have been reminded how miserable it is to feel incapacitated and bedridden, how quickly you can start feeling depressed and despondent and have been thinking about various members of the group who have spoken about various ailments, operations, afflictions, problems with mobility etc….I suppose it is another aspect of getting older, a part of life that you don’t have to deal with so much when you are young , but it creeps in as you get older. Anyway it’s a relief to be feeling on the mend, and that my glass is half full again and not emptying.
I have been doing portrait sessions with the people in the Village Voice group photographing them in their own domestic setting, and a couple of the women have ended up talking about how their husbands have died very suddenly; one from undiagnosed cancer and another from a brain haemorrhage, they were both fine one day and gone the next. Its back to the “D’ word and the issue of longevity which relates (hopefully not too obviously) to the portrait artworks I am making for the exhibition.
The portraits I am making are not straightforward portraits although I am giving the participants their own portrait in return for their participation, and hopefully this is fair exchange. In the actual artworks for the exhibition I am almost entirely removing the person from the portrait, so they are left only as a line and their shadows. I am removing as much of the image of the person as I possibly can without them actually disappearing. In a way its an exploration of drawing within the context of digital photography, I suppose I am interested in the relationship photography has within Fine Art practice, having coming from a painting background, although I am currently more comfortable with drawing as an actual medium and its versatility, rather than an intermediate step. Ironically the photographs look quite sculptural as they play with space.
During the portrait sessions one of the women in the group started telling me about her life, this was precipitated by the fact that we have been sent a 93 page letter by one of the residents about his childhood growing up in Dublin, and she has volunteered to read it as I have no time free at the moment. This has obviously appealed to her a she has the notion to write about her life own story for the benefit of her grand children, as hers is quite a convoluted one. She was given up for adoption at birth as her mother came from a small town near Fort William, and was forced to come to Glasgow in secret, no doubt, to have the baby and then give it away, in order to return to her life. She remembers ILLIGITEMATE written in large bold red letters across her birth certificate, and never feeling like she belonged to the family she was adopted into, being told not to get ideas above her station and not being allowed to stay on at school despite being the Dux. She feels like the stigma of her birth, in a way has followed her all her life. We also talked about how society has changed over the past couple of generations, for women, for the better hopefully.
On Thursday night at the opening for Glasgow International I met EJ Major who is currently showing at Street Level Gallery, Glasgow and we talked about her photography series that documents the demise of a woman through drug use, using photo portraits. I told her about the projects I had worked on recently for organizations like Routes Out, the Wayside and Aberlour No 1. The phrase “But for the grace of God go you or I” was mentioned, and again the image of a pack of cards comes to mind. In a way we all live our lives with the cards that are dealt to us, whatever they may be.
In a different portrait session, one of the group handed me a pile of old photographs from the Bahamas with Edward and Mrs Simpson, which were very striking and also hand sewn postcards sent from France during the First World War, very poignant when you know that the sender, Uncle Jim, never came home. One contains the phrase “I Don’t Forget You” which seems like a strange use of language, but then I was thinking that these were cards sent by people who didn’t know if they would have a future, by people in limbo, living for that moment.