Ouroboros

I end this publication in the same place I began: submerged in grief, tethered to absence, consumed by a question that refuses resolution. In January of this year, my father passed away. I thought I had already endured the full shape of loss — the haunting that followed my brother’s disappearance, the slow erosion of self in an institutional space that was not structured to consider me — but this death swallowed me again. Grief has no chronology. It loops. Siphoned, often times being a comforting destruction. Similar to the Ouroboros represented as a snake ‘with its tail in its mouth, continually devouring itself and being reborn’ (Encyclopædia Britannica,n.d) within the darkroom I had encountered the serpent in my work : prints overexposed so that detail and composition became lost, contaminated fixer stained contact sheets and bodies revealing themselves through chemical fault. Like Sally Mann ‘What Remains’ - the photographic surface became a site of psychic contact. Her collodion flaws echoed mine — the emulsions breaking down under the weight of what they attempted to hold. She said that “photographs must somehow participate in what they depict or their truth is unearned.” (Rexer, 2009). I understood this. My photographs did not depict trauma — they enacted it. 

It had been my brother's disappearance that prompted such hauntological analysis of my work, seeing the ghosts in a literal sense embed themselves within the emulsion in the form of fingerprints. The grief has enacted itself within the darkroom and has cornered me into the depths of my subconscious, appearing ‘in the form of a ghost and ontology the study of the nature of being’ (BBC Archive, 2024). Going back to key locations in my brother's investigation, Holloway, Lewisham and Ilford - London I sat uncomfortable with the knowledge of these being some of the last known whereabouts of where my brother was 16 years ago; only this time they missed a key component to what I was looking for and yet couldn’t articulate. A longing for what once was, an image unscathed and visible to me in the present form. An interview with Sally Mann and Blake Morrison from The Guardian circled me she states, "There's a new prudery around death. We've moved it into the hospital, behind screens, and no longer wear black markers to acknowledge its presence. It's become unmentionable." (Morrison). The work insisted I sat with death, not to mourn it but to name it. The darkroom space holds a unique funeral ceremony : not for bodies but for the evidence of their vanishing. My fathers passing had concluded the years of ambiguity that laid at the feet of my practice, which questioned how one could shape their own happiness in the process of image creation. The answers remain undiscovered. But exists - in the re-exploration of archival negatives that fracture and reform the shape of grief, identity and ambiguity reincarnating the ghosts of my practice in a new light, gentle and tangible. 

- A ghost that whispers ‘Can you see your happiness?’ 

This work doesn’t end. It devours itself just like me. Just like the system that demanded I turn my grief into prints, not to survive but to haunt. And I hope it lingers; because I am still here - and this is how I’ve returned. Not whole, not healed; but visible. Like a test strip I’m held in a chemical trace. Suspended in silver. I refuse to fade.