The Story behind the Portrait

When time came for my mom to move from her home into an apartment, it also meant time for me to move my things out of the attic. There, amongst the pink insulation, sat Sally. For all these years my mother had saved her (and I continue to keep her) my walking doll, safely tucked into my closet.

I noticed my mother-in-law also had a doll sitting quietly in a spare bedroom. ‘Why had she kept it?’ I wondered, and were there other women like us who had also kept their childhood dolls? So started the journey of finding and photographing the series ‘Sue and Winnie‘.

Sigmund Freud believed the uncanny to be something which leads us back to what is old and familiar but is, at the same time, ‘unheimlich’ or uncomfortable. This series explores the idea of the uncanny as it manifests in a longing for youth, and a recognition of mortality. The images are tinged with a sense of ‘momento mori’ – remember that you are mortal.

The inclusion of this self portrait in the ‘Sue and Winnie‘ series of images is a visual confrontation of my own fragility.