Family Portrait : etchings 2014-26

A series of hand drawn etchings underpinned by their relationship with time – in their subject, in their making and in their printed configurations.

 These works arose through the close attention of habitual drawing and the act of noticing, in this case the array of familiar features that materialised on my children’s faces as these formed and aged. As an artist with a past heavily peopled by self-portraits, I have a keen awareness of how, when drawing, a small digression in proportion transforms my features into those of a parent or distant relation. The first images, drawn in 2014, initially existed as singular portraits made to record close family members physical appearance at that time.

The second set of drawings were made in 2020 during lockdown, a time that dislocated people. As the media reports talked about isolation, cluster and some families living ‘on top of each other’, I thought about our quotidian circumstances and our genetic histories and I began to experiment printing a ‘likeness’ from one time on top of another - compressing time. Plates created six years apart were combined, dragging the past into the present. In etching the mordant, that etches the drawn image, is susceptible to fluctuations of ambient temperature and here this shift in its liveliness causes subtle changes of line density from plate to plate. Material evidence of chronological difference. The resulting images present impossible generational relationships, distorting chronological time and upending the consistency of memory. Their subjects inhabiting a transitional space in which time is drawn out and suspended.

This is an ongoing project and recently additional plates have been drawn and incorporated, never now existing as sole identities always in dialogue across time.