Home
Silent Rooms With Loud Memories
Lucy DolleryMy series ‘Silent Rooms with Loud Memories’ explores the relationship between memory, nostalgia, family relations and rephotography. Through old family photographs in parallel to current self-portraits taken within the same visual spaces as my past self, close-ups of objects and layering archival images onto current photographs. This series captures what it's like l back on childhood from the perspective of the youngest sibling, having your siblings grow up, exploring new interests and moving out, one by one. As the youngest child I grew up with my identity being shaped by looking up to those older than me, figuratively and literally. By revisiting and producing these images, I observe my own narrative within my family structure, enabling myself to reflect on how childhood memories continue to influence me. Using different photography techniques to explore how we archive our lives to allow nostalgia to take over, bringing both comfort and complexity.
I invite the viewer to look deeper into the series, what emotion do they feel from the images? Is there a story? Do they relate? The images side by side draw a spiralling connection between growth and vulnerability, between the concept of innocence from being a child vs awareness from my current age, that I have chosen individually to be shared. I use my prints as a metaphor for being the youngest of my siblings, born into the already living nostalgia of my family. Using a tripod to capture these self-portraits, I create an intimate setting, just myself and the camera. My images surface as an a4 sequence, being numbered from 1 to 24. The sequence flows cohesively through my house, using its architecture as a guide for comparison between the past and present. This sequence is repetitively interrupted by small fragments from my childhood that appear throughout the work. These details float between spaces, refusing to settle in their original rooms. Their presence mirrors the way memory operates, breaking the order of the house and complicating the act of comparison. As the viewer moves through the house, they are pulled out of the present by these fragments, asked to navigate not only the architecture of the home but the idea of memory itself.
I invite the viewer to look deeper into the series, what emotion do they feel from the images? Is there a story? Do they relate? The images side by side draw a spiralling connection between growth and vulnerability, between the concept of innocence from being a child vs awareness from my current age, that I have chosen individually to be shared. I use my prints as a metaphor for being the youngest of my siblings, born into the already living nostalgia of my family. Using a tripod to capture these self-portraits, I create an intimate setting, just myself and the camera. My images surface as an a4 sequence, being numbered from 1 to 24. The sequence flows cohesively through my house, using its architecture as a guide for comparison between the past and present. This sequence is repetitively interrupted by small fragments from my childhood that appear throughout the work. These details float between spaces, refusing to settle in their original rooms. Their presence mirrors the way memory operates, breaking the order of the house and complicating the act of comparison. As the viewer moves through the house, they are pulled out of the present by these fragments, asked to navigate not only the architecture of the home but the idea of memory itself.