Thank you Estelle

Craddock, Joanna ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6782-1722 (2016) Thank you Estelle. Feast.

Abstract

Thank you Estelle is a creative project comprising a collection of photography, digital montage and gif. It is part of a broader and ongoing body of photographic work responding to bereavement and inheritance, to explore the power and meaning of the familial object. Research process: Craddock’s research is based on a family archive of a small collection of domestic objects inherited from the artist’s aunt, alongside vernacular family snapshots and press photos of her from the 1950s. In a playful process, it photographically explores these now decontextualized objects and photographs. The work draws on ideas about the ‘affective object’ (Casella and Woodward 2014: 104), ideas of ‘copresence’ (Barthes 1980), and the ways in which materiality (or immateriality) enables the image to be performed (Edwards & Elart: 2004: 10). Research insights: The photographs refer to the lived experience of the person constructed through the visual culture associated with their life. Family photographs, objects and artefacts act memorialise, they are still resonant in some way and that through a creative process of repurposing and re- contextualisation, existing meaning can be drawn out and re-animated through new creative and visual associations. The work highlights changing notions of femininity, shown through dress, gesture and pose, and the artefacts of gendered material culture; a retirement cake encountered in a family photograph is remade and reimagined as a moving image to spin eternally in networked space, highlighting notions of gendered domestic ritual, repetition and time. Dissemination: The work has been disseminated online in peer-reviewed journal, Feast, and Soanyway magazine, and via exhibition at Leeds Arts University (2016, 2017 and 2018) and St Martins Church, Leeds (2018).

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