“Back In your Own Backyard” explores the tension between presence and absence through a contemporary fashion image-making context. It seeks to create a sensory experience following the traces of human interaction within spaces that have changed, emptied, or disappeared entirely.
To stand in the same room and feel something entirely different is to face the reality that the past can’t be returned to. Yet within this loss, this absence, there is also continuity. This enquiry is a microcosm of a universal experience; the emotions that arise in absence transcend the borders of Greater Manchester, this is an experience shared by all.
Two locations shape the narrative of this project. At the centre of the work is my Nana’s house and family textiles mill, spaces once filled warmth, life and familiarity that now stand cold and unfamiliar — both victims of time and circumstance.
This project considers how transformation can generate new meaning.
Ultimately, this body of work is an introspection into the duality of live and loss, portraying the uncomfortable but necessary acceptance that nothing is forever.
But instead of forgetting, it proposes something else: that in letting go, we create space to commemorate, to carry forward, and allow the spirit of what once was to live on in new forms.