Invisible boundaries:a photographic archive

Invisible Boundaries has as its practical project a photographic archive of 1200 images that sequentially documents and records my living space by (re- )visiting the same locations, objects, traces and detritus over a period of three years, 1999 to 2002. This resulted in two major national exhibitions at the Michael Tippet Centre, Bath Spa University 2002 and The Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton 2005. Here photographs from the project Invisible Boundaries were displayed in 27 enlarged photographic images and a CDrom of 700 images. My written dissertation describes and explores the relationship between my various recording methods and the various evocative outcomes produced as an exhibition, where images are visually enlarged, magnified and displayed, and a CDrom, where implicit details are archived and revealed in greater scope and magnitude. Chapters 1 and 2 (The Work and The Archive) explore in detail the photographic collection in my work and explicitly in two major works, Gerhardt Richter's Atlas (2004) and Sol Lewitt's Autobiography (1980), two large bodies of archived photographic works. In Chapter 3 The Domestic and Personal, Invisible Boundaries is considered alongside modern documentary practice relative to the home context through the images of Martin Parr, Nan Goldin and Larry Sultan. Both personal and objective, my thesis specifically analyses the projects Signs of the Times (Parr 1992), The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Goldin 1982) and Pictures from Home (Sultan 1989). The practical work allowed for the single image to be taken, stored and reviewed against a larger body of images that formed the archive. This practical analysis is concluded in Chapter 4, Photographic Fiction and Loss, which draws on the contexts of documentary and archival practice established in my work, where these works become an emotional and nostalgic product. Throughout all chapters I am interested in the continued dominance of the singular image in contemporary writing at a time when digital technology and culture are making the multiplicity of images prevalent. Overall Invisible Boundaries is an in-direct autobiographical and cumulative photographic archive. Through its continuous photographic recording of the rooms, spaces and items in my home, it shows how the tracings and residues of an existence and the banality of moments, holistically form an archive of historical moments, which also says something about my life.