Jennifer Varney

I explore ideas of memory, personal history, the family archive and narrative. In my practise I use photography, film and sound to address my continuing fascination in the living memory. I work closely with my grandmother and her encounters of memory during the fifties era looking particularly at family scrapbooks. I am intrigued by this passing of time and the effect it has on the individual’s memory.
In my most recent project I have explored the family album. Seeing the album as an object, I was drawn to revealing this personal memory. The scrapbook became a visual narrative which encouraged my grandmother to remember her past experiences. The album uncovered the mundane but similarly a very captivating and compassionate narrative for the individual.
The body of work engages the viewer with memory and the image. The images are my personal interpretation of my grandmother’s memory. Steam railways, beaches, traditional villages, holiday parks, these poetic images give no definite time frame of when they were taken, questioning whether they are past or present. The use of slide film was in keeping with the study of the album, the slide show being seen as a social event and gathering by the family. The slide projector itself is an object or machine the photograph is viewed through and without it, the slide is an object like the closed scrapbook.
The final work is presented as a film, capturing the narration and this clunky sound of the projector seeming as though my grandmother is sitting in the room re-telling her memories. The projection filmed from this angle enforces the idea of memory and something being half remembered. The video camera deals with the slide projector in a very interesting way, when the image flashes up on the slide projector the video camera takes time to focus the image. The projection has a rich glow, slowly flashing from one image to another implying someone remembering their past.
Previously I have been inspired to re-stage elements of the past within my work. ‘Bank holiday 2007’ was an example of this, I re-constructed an element of the fifties photograph by arranging for my family to take a trip to the beach. More recently re-staging a fifties dance for my local community, both events were re-constructions of my grandmother’s memories creating an experience for the individual in the present day. Sound has been vital in my practise as it explores encounters from past or present events. Sound creates miss-conceptions and new identities like I explored in the project “Margaret Reeves looks back” which was a sound recording based on a fictional character, here I was testing how much we rely on the individual to tell us the truth and how miss-guided the viewer can become.
“Photography has the function of helping one to overcome the sorrow of the passing of time, either by providing a magical substitute for what time has destroyed, or making up for the failures in memory, acting as a mooring for the evocation of associated memories”
The cult of unity and cultivated differences, Pierre Bourdieu.