An Imagined Encounter
This project attempts to understand and help situate myself within my immediate surroundings. Despite having lived in Britain my whole life, I am aware of a feeling of detachment towards the British countryside that I spent childhood summers exploring. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that this feeling of ‘something missing’ stems from my own lack of knowledge regarding my family’s history.
I turned to my family archives for more; but as I was rifling through my great-grandmother’s collection of photographs, I became conscious of the way I was creating fictions about them. I did not know these individuals whose solemn faces stared back at me from this time-capsule I held in my hands. They never knew me, and furthermore I had no one left to ask.
I started looking around me, trying to focus on how my knowledge of my own history, or lack of, has slowly seeped into my subconscious and permeated the way I view my own identity.
