Borbala PoczBorn in Hungary. Lives in: Greater Manchester
John Moores Liverpool/Stockport College
This project was inspired by the mummy portraits from the Ancient Egypt collection of the Manchester Museum. It recycles old vernacular photos from the family archive, painted with liquid light on ordinary used chopping boards, handed down from generation to generation. They encapsulate layers of kindred history. The pieces evoke the way we deal with our cherished snippets of fugitive memories, dug up from the archaeological site of our psyche. Genuine or fake, distorted or borrowed, blocked out forever or recovered, they make up the background tissue of who we think we are.
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Work of art I would like to makeI would like to continue working with my family album, my heritage. I am drawn to and drowned by these woman figures, my mother and my grandmother’s faces, their strong gaze. I am trying to piece together their life stories, what made them into what they were, they become. I am trying to confront the impossibility of this task, the fact that I will never be able to fully understand who they were, what happened to them and consequently who I am. I guess this is parallel to Roland Barthes’ quest to find a clue about his mother looking at old photographs.
I am now working with different 3D object, masks, pieces of wood, chopping boards, cloths. My latest attempt is to conjure up a picture, their spirit, onto these surfaces with the help of liquid light (silver gelatine emulsion). These experiments need a lot of time, this is a hit and miss process, which seems to me an essential element of this work. In our post-photographic digital world, I need to go back to a more traditional type of method, something time-consuming and very manual.
The piece I could imagine producing would be a more than life-size portrait, possibly merging that of my mother and my grandmother, still using the liquid light process, but this time on a different material, on cloth, perhaps on a used, old piece of bed linen, a sheet.
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My Artworks (6)
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