"Is it you or I who says

Out of my love for you

I will give you back to yourself"   Minor White

Place, Identity, Memory and the Artists Book.

Place, Identity and Memory is an International exhibition of books made by artists.  It opens on the 22^nd of May at the Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, Scotland, until the 27^th of June when it will go on tour until October.

This exhibition runs in collaboration with the Dumfries Art Festival.

I am honoured that my book ‘Your Family’ will be on show throughout the exhibition and festival.

Your Family places found photographs alongside my contemporary images so that they can hold conversations.  They become an invitation into the narrative and into ones own memories, identity and thus give us a sense of place.

It shows how we have grown, how different we are, how our lives have changed and poses questions about how the people within the pages have contributed to that change.

The photograph is an integral part of our society and ourselves, giving us a complex and moving substance to our existence.  It offers many philosophical ideas that underline aspects of our society and our personal lives that no other medium has been able to undertake.  Your Family looks at the essential bearing we all play on each other’s lives and my fascination with humanity and the photograph.

Picking up a book, and then opening its pages is like in turn opening a door, a portal into a world.  It gives the viewer everything like a blooming flower, and it gives time to turn the pages at ones own pace and in which sequence one desires.  It often is a chance to be more personal than rooms and walls allow, for the rooms become contained within the fingers and palms of your hands.

For me it’s a privilege and exciting prospect to be shown alongside such Artists as Erica Van Horn and David Rhys Jones, among others and wishing everyone a fruitful and successful show.

I wandered lonely as a cloud.

Kali Yuga - The age of Destruction

Kali Yuga

 

When I look to the sky I see boundlessness, a place with such energy, so much beauty, vast endless shapes and tones.  I see so much change; have we ever seen the same sky twice?

I find it incredible, powerful and with it, it brings destruction and it brings peace.

In our time we have experienced so much creation of technology, obsessions with progressions, upgrades, whatever we have never seems to be enough, there is the desire for more, more, more, faster, faster, faster.

I so often wish for it all to stop, to get off, and to wander out of the concrete and back to the forest.

To go backwards from unnecessary complexities to nurturing simplicities.

We have destroyed so much, created so much anger and hate.  We have created so much destruction; Kali Yuga is the age of destruction.

These images are shot with that in mind, they are shot using a mobile phone; taking out all the depth in the beauty of traditional photographic techniques, reducing the image to a snap.  They show pixels giving an almost satellite quality about them.  Apart from composition they are without much thought.

However with destruction comes creation, as we are now coming out of Kali Yuga, we are now in a time of transition, moving into Dwapara Yuga; a much calmer period, one of opening our minds, a time to move backwards.

And as much as these images are shot using a mobile phone, they are printed on beautiful fine art paper, care and thought taken over them.  They are smudged at the edges, the sky is calling not to be contained in this frame, as it wants to spread its endlessness.

The juxtaposition of destruction and creation are shown in the shades between light and dark.  As I look to the sky I am never entirely sure which way it is going to change, how it will effect my day, but I always look to it and learn to trust in it.

Kali Yuga and Dwapara Yuga, we are beginning the transition between the two, a time for reflection on all we have created and in turn destroyed and of hope for a more peaceful future.

 

Nicola Zammit.