“In 2014 my paternal grandfather was diagnosed with a muscular degenerative disorder. Shortly afterwards and with no warning to his wife or four sons, he killed himself. I had only met him a handful of times, but several of his cameras have been handed down to me in the years since his death. The most recent of these was still fitted with a memory card that contained these photographs.
Handling them, I felt as if I was my grandfather, standing in his garden pressing the shutter. A few short years later, this same person whose eyes I was staring through, who seemed to have found beauty in these moments he had saw fit to capture, bought a canister of helium from a party supply shop and used it to wilfully suffocate himself to death. For this reason, my relationship with these photos is an uneasy one. In some ways they represent the solipsistic, and ultimately meaningless, nature of life, coupled with the inevitability of death. The life seen in them does not evoke joy or wonder but rather boredom and was shortly followed with a silent and cowardly death.
Every life is but a mere whisper in a screaming world; a tiny speckle of light caught between a yawning abyss of non-existence, and the infinite darkness of death. In an infinity of time, we have a few decades to live. Our closeness to death and the fragility of life I find to be both immensely sad and enormously comforting. We are each free to choose to either fear, deny or bask in the insignificance of our existence.”
EXHIBITIONS
Work featured in group exhibition Focal Points at WASPS Hanson Street Studios, Glasgow. March 6-13 2020.
An Advert for Both Life and Death, digital print, 60x85cm.
