Installation of House Ghosts 1996

I don’t change

but the photos of my children

grow younger all the time.

My children are ageless too

but their recorded images

alter every year

The photo children become thin or fat

They wear braces or smiles,

spectacles or scowls.

Their hair is straight or curled,

but in their present flesh

they are constant.

My heart holds them so,

As my eyes hold them loved.

Note on the photo of the House Ghosts installation for Cambridge Open Studios

One day I moved some pictures from my dining room wall and saw that there were faint marks around the places they had been. This stirred my heart. I thought of removals and changes and the germ of an idea for this installation was born. I made transparencies from the photos of myself and my husband and all our children and framed them so that the marks on the wall behind could be seen through them when they were hung up.  There were many emotions stirred up by this installation. Every home, every house has ‘ghosts’ in it even when the same people live all their lives there – the ghosts of themselves as young, as infants, as adolescents. What I also found as I looked at the photos were the genetic ‘ghosts’ that haunt us in the physical appearance of ourselves and our children. This was also an homage to my family that was riven by divorce that year 1996.

Cambridge Open Studios is a wonderful idea started by people I knew there many years previously. Artists exhibit every year in their own studios or homes and the organisation coordinates with a catalogue and maps. I took part for many years till I left Cambridge and took part in the Artists Network Bedfordshire Open Studios.