November 15th 1975. Trish Morrissey, courtesy the artist.
Rebecca Atkinson headed up to the Gardner Arts Centre to get acquainted with Trish Morrissey's revealing and evocative work.
The Gardner Arts Centre, in association with Photoworks, presents a new body of work by photographer Trish Morrissey.
The exhibition was commissioned and organised by Impressions Gallery in York, and will run until November 26.
Entitled Seven Years, the collection was inspired by family relationships and photo albums. As Morrissey explained to the 24 Hour Museum: "Family photographs are something everybody takes, but they are often posed."
"I wanted to explore how body language can indicate subliminal messages within these portraits."
April 16th 1984. Trish Morrissey, courtesy the artist.
Morrissey, with the help of her sister, impersonated family members, both real and imagined, to create a series of family snap-shots where such secret tensions are revealed.
The images re-enact memories familiar to all of us, such as birthday parties and trips to the seaside. Others capture characters passing their driving test, or welcoming a new child into the family.
In one photograph a mother and her daughter pose arm in arm. The mother’s smile fails to mask her anxious and uncomfortable expression. Her daughter stares moodily into the camera, highlighting the falsity of their pose and hinting at the cracks in their relationship.
Elsewhere, a girl poses unsmiling on a beach, self-consciously aware of her developing body. The photographer’s fingers over the lens are deliberately included, mimicking an amateurish family photo.
Two new video works accompany the photographic collection. In Eleven and Three Quarters Morrissey poses as a boy chasing an elusive rabbit around a back garden.
October 1st 1987. Trish Morrissey, courtesy the artist.
Shot in a home movie style, the viewer shares the boy’s frustration as the pet repeatedly dodges his grip and hides in the bushes, which seem to symbolise the unknown world outside.
The second film, Eighteen and Forty Five, shows Morrissey and her mother, both decapitated by the camera and wearing a wedding dress, dancing to Glen Miller’s Moonlight Serenade.
The title refers to the number of years since they both came of age – the dress was worn by Morrissey’s mother 45 years previously at her wedding, and was later donned by an 18 year old Morrissey at her formal school ball. The mundane concrete yard in which they dance highlights the youthful and romantic hopes encapsulated in the dress, and the changes that have occurred since it was first worn.
Morrissey’s photographs are full of painstaking detail, from original retro clothing to classic 1980s party food.
The nostalgia of the 70s and 80s is brought to life in these images, but they also reveal a sinister side to family relationships that is both unexpected and highly unsettling.
Based in the south east of England, Photoworks commissions new photography projects, produces exhibitions and publications and initiates research and education programmes. For more information visit their website.
