The 1976 Ohio birth index records my birthplace as Wake Wake Island, a non place, a code phrase meaning ‘adopted out of state.’ Maternity home babies weren’t supposed to find their scandalous mothers, so details were obscured, names were changed, files were sealed, and I became a blank slate.
Working primarily with 35mm snapshot photography, my practice is intuitive and responsive, often rhizoming in a way that I find difficult to speak about, so I make photographs to find out if I’m real and where my home is.
The RSA Morton Award has given me the space and time to construct the landscape of Wake Wake Island. I’ve been able to experiment with tactile photo printing; working with designers and the RNIB to make a small special book which prioritises a disabled audience. Every detail has been shaped and led by the constraints of current accessibility practice. It’s experimental and a bit of a gamble to put photographs that are meant to be touched in a gallery. It’s a subversion of the usual: accessibility as afterthought.
This work has been finished in my studio (in my bedroom) with a vaulted blue ceiling of water above; bed and my disabled body as landscape below. It’s been a sort of posthumous collaboration with Dr Ian MacKenzie and a bag of his forgotten unprocessed slide film from the 60s and 70s. When I began developing the rolls, the first photograph that I saw was of palm trees in a storm— I was finding the island. Occasional black holes and flocks of birds/insects appear through the deterioration of the film. There is a white car that I’d previously seen in a child’s drawing—it looks like the car my parents are leaning against in the only photo I have seen of them together. And there is a bloodline that runs through it all— a refusal to be erased.
