Siân Pile
London
Photographic artist
'In Memory' The Playground, The Beach, The Sand Dunes, The Walk (2006). My images operate in the half open spaces between the private and the public, observing the mysterious undercurrents of family life. The sites I photograph are significant for a variety of reasons - the scene of an argument, of tenderness, of anxiety. They are moments that emanate outside the regular flow of time. The absence of horizons or their claustrophobic closeness means that space can become ambiguous, time collapses, landscape becomes symbolic. They are a form by which I can record and memorise perceptions. Seeing and memory are defensive operations. In reworking and reediting memories it is possible to breach the order of reality to emphasise psychological intensity. Looking is a form of cognition, a complex and untrustworthy process. Through acknowledging the fragmentary relationship between reality, memory and image, it is possible to re-examine the past and re-create it, as writers create stories with reference to their own lives. In this process my family become 'the family', my child becomes 'the child'. They have become memories filled with colour, toxic and illusive as fantasy. The Glass House (2005-7) This is an ongoing series of images in which I enclose the viewer within the tightly constricting boundaries of a glass house, to create ambiguous, dreamlike spaces. The absence of an horizon encourages an abstract, painterly quality. There is an underlying sense of decay and corruption which sits uneasily alongside the ephemeral beauty of the butterflies and the lush vegetation.
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