Muniment Monument

Then, copy, portraiture, figure, diagram, icon, picture, mimicry, echo. 
Then, gnomon, clue, trail, vestige, indie, evidence, symptom, trace. 
Then, muniment, monument, keepsake, memento, souvenir, cue.
– Charles Sanders Peirce 1905

Subject turned object and wood turning on grandfather’s lathe and turned wooden objects turned false monument in landscapes seeking to recapture the experience of a place where… an archive of images taken from a time of personal upheaval 15 years prior a grandfather’s wood workshop wall left untouched for 25 years. Muniment evidences ownership over a document tracing legal lineage.

Heaps and hill sought out in search of a landscape where a young self was lost Gazes meeting gazes Camera acting as mediator Images replacing lived experience Clinging to her camera to save from possession, she photographs nearly every act; every praying mantis and every willing person.

Soft murder, Susan Sontag would say.

Actual murder he would cry in the night; ranting, raving of the guns buried in the yard, and the terrible things he had done and the spot on that girls back not from the sun. You will wonder is there a murder in words? Is it safe to be using these films? Is her skin the wrong colour to put that up on a white wall? Can hair still hold power decades later? The colour of the sky, of the flag, of sex, drugs and witchcraft.

Photographing mounds reminiscent of the Hill under guise of environmentalist sublime seeking pretence.

In the early days of the first trip to Botswana, before learning the legend of said Hill, its star-crossed lovers, and the bad omen that befalls anyone foolish enough to climb its cliffs, hiking up the Baratani to photograph, she came upon an inexplicably smouldering tree. Through wisps of smoke lay the translucent shed skin of a python.

She wondered how it would feel to be swallowed whole.

Muniment Monument combines landscape, portrait and object, portrait subject turned object. Object turned of wood, turned into monument through photograph.  Glaring gazes confront complexities. The photograph, just as the painting, a means to preserve the losing self, layered with anxiety and seen through obscuring.