till death us do part

The question of who is allowed to occupy the family domain is reaffirmed through photographic representation, depicting couples who conform to societal ‘norms’. Till death us do part are a series of photographs in which my husband Peter and I perform a number of absurd scenarios in and around the domestic environment. As an academic, I was always critical of what the ‘family album’ represented in terms of normality and otherness so there is little photographic evidence to represent the 36 years that Peter and I have now spent together. As Peter is now in his late 80s there seemed to be an urgency to make work together exploring concepts of the family album and the couple/wedding portrait. The works are staged and don’t reflect a documentary approach to recording reality. The style, or particular mode of representation, was initially inspired by examples of the couple/wedding portrait from art history. Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami (1434) is probably the most famous depiction of a wedding portrait in the history of western art. These wax-like figures frozen in the moment evoke a sense of uncanniness. It is this sense of the uncanny which Freud talked about in terms of heimlich and unheimlich– homely/unhomely-familiar/unfamiliar, that I wanted to explore visually, creating absurd permutations inside and outside the domestic environment.