M o r i b u n d

Moribund is an involved investigation into a group of elderly women’s individual experiences of their last stage of life. Photographed exclusively at Greenbanks elderly care home, the work explores what these experiences reveal about human responses to ageing and mortality, holding up to scrutiny the practice of 'annexing' the elderly, the guilt associated with it, and presumptions concerning older people's acceptance of death.

In this I am particularly interested in the extensively theorised assumption that photography has a unique and incisive relationship with reality that causes the viewer to seek out the ‘tiny spark of accident’ that will reveal some secret truth about the subject. Of course, the images may provide insight into the subjects, but they are equally an evocation of my perception of their collective unease - coloured by one resident's guilty anxiety about her inevitable death - and an exploration of my own relationship to mortality.

I embarked on this project whilst working on my recent exhibition, Absent. The two, thematically interwoven projects, are a reflection of my continuing fascination with mortality and its implications - both personal and social.

These investigations are part of a broader thesis attempting to discover whether photography can be used to elucidate commonalities within subjective experience - both meaningful and mundane - specifically concentrating on the experiences of women, reflecting my continuing fascination with gender as social construct.