Be/Longing: Documenting the ‘invisible’ through lens-based practices.
Be/Longing uses lens-based practices to document the transition into adulthood and how ‘longing’ can accompany this change. The work reflects my own transition of moving from a rural/regional upbringing to Melbourne and the expectation to move away once you become of age. My praxis centres on how I can capture the ‘invisible’ weight of this experience — aspects that are more felt than seen. My work is shot primarily on film, the process and duration reflect my desire to slow down during this transition. The subjects of my images are symbols of ‘home’ partnered with my current life, to portray how I perceive longing – combined desire and nostalgia. Using documentary photography, the work challenges how abstract visual representation can create feeling. Longing for me operates in a dual of desire and nostalgia, thus my creative work explores how two profound meanings can fall under a single word.
The creative works express my identity as an adult with more agency, reflecting the internal as well as environmental factors that contribute to this transition e.g. people, places and things. The project combines both art-based and social documentary-style images, with video and audio. These elements speak to and capture the fleeting states of change when entering adulthood, and the conflict between yearning for the past and the uncertainty of the future. The work unpacks the paradox of ‘loss’ during this transition and challenges ways of using portraiture to document figurative iterations of ‘self’. The project reflects my introspective experience, documenting how I carry my upbringing in rural WA, in the Irish Catholic diaspora and how those bridge to now – that is, entering adulthood far from home. My practice uses unconventional techniques, such as out of focus shots and slower shutter speeds to highlight my fascination of finding binary oppositions within my work; uniform within chaos, patterns within randomness and beauty within malignant.
