Sarah Meynell

My work gravitates around how photographs, specifically family or found photographs, can exercise such a nostalgic grip on a viewer. My practice investigates why some photographs echo such power in their anachronistic and nostalgic portrayal and their activation of memory and time, and how these responses perpetuate ideas of a self and of an art practice.

The concepts of time and memory affect photographs in an anachronistic manner, exercising their cross-disciplinary behaviour on the methods and methodology of my practice. This introduces the question: does memory create a self and a practice, or does a self and a practice create the memory? This question propels the research into the constituents of memory and time, how they operate together, and how they act upon a viewer, a work, a space, the presentation of a work, the creation, and the practice that surrounds it.

Addressing this question resulted in the physical retracing of the subject within found photographs. In this performative action, I adopted the memory encapsulated in the photograph. Boundaries of physical place and temporal place became blended; became each other.

This cross-disciplinary nature is demonstrated in my engagement with the practice of artists’ books, echoed in the presentation becoming the work, the work becoming the presentation, and how the location of the presentation and work is considered. Roles become one another: the curator becomes the editor, who becomes the artist, and so on.