Artist statement: ‘North 1978’ is a photo-sculptural installation consisting of five chromogenic prints. Mounted to identically sized dibond panels, ‘North 1978’ functions to form a portrait of my mother as a child in 1978. Hung flush to the wall, the work uses the fixed nature of its installation to consider other forms of tethering, particularly unconditional love and its provision of an emotional anchor.

Suggesting that my mother is my personal ‘north star’, I use the symbolic associations with the historic guiding point to meditate upon chance and aspiration, the overwhelming resilience of filial bonds spurring a bittersweet questioning of maternal fate and my role in its determination. Covertly acquiring the original photograph from my mother, I employed a blend of digital and analogue methodologies to develop the final work. Working from a high-resolution scan of the provided small print, I used image-processing software to create the five segments featured in the installation before turning them into individual digital prints. Seeking a greater scale than what was possible through the printing technologies available, the segments were then rephotographed on 120 mm film and taken into the colour darkroom for further manipulation. Using analogue printmaking to transform both the scale and the materiality of the final work, the process of developing ‘North 1978’ reflects the meditative quality of the final installation, the slow nature of the colour darkroom prompting a way of making that felt conceptually tied to the work itself.