‘Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.’ Friedrich Nietzsche

The work is concerned with the relationship between a father and son as seen through the eyes of their wife and mother of forty years. Family relationships are defined over time by experience and moulded by received notions from the proliferation of fact and fiction prevalent today. The work tries to disrupt the familiar and often fixed nature of long term relationship by manipulating the parameters of looking within the language of photography and film.

‘Relative Space’ alludes to the distance that can develop in family relationships over time and to the central space between the figures. This is not the shadow play of Plato’s cave waiting for external enlightenment, but rather related to Heidegger’s jug parable where the essential, unique ‘being’ of the vessel lies not in its clay walls, but in the space it contains. It reflects the enigma of the void, negative space, used by artists through history to grapple with ideas of existence, with presence and absence, with infinity and death. Here its empty negative aspect is turned to positive use as a place for contemplation where there might be the possibility of change in fixed, stuck thought patterns.

Time is at the heart of the work. It is a time which inhabits the border between the photographic and cinematic. The still camera becomes a witness to time passing rather than the index of an event. There is resonance in the early repetitions of Marey and Muybridge’s images which attempted to scientifically analyse movement by breaking it down frame by frame. The animations use still images taken over a short space of time and expanded in film software to slowly repeating endless loops. They reflect the claustrophobia and frustration of family relationship whilst encouraging a slowing down of thought and the uncovering of possible new unconscious meaning to emerge.

The work explores strategies to circumvent expectations of the familiar. The attention of the viewer is extended in the movement from one figure to the other and the eventual settling in the central space. It is defocused away from the defined roles of the figures as father and son. As the surface shifts the work makes room for the possibility of alternative meanings for ‘father’, ‘’son’, wife’ and ‘mother’.