Belfast, Helsinki, Copenhagen

I made an entry into exhibiting my work at the next Belfast Photo. This was an early stage of the project and I was keen to consider the idea and create a statement of my submission to frame it as a starting point. The work is evolving, as expected, as I work through the archive and also start to react and respond to the images. Since this submission, I have also made submissions to two further photography festivals – Helsinki Photo, and Copenhagen Photo.

All three festivals have a different theme in order to develop each iteration of the work. I did question whether I should be submitting work to these festivals at a stage in the project where I am still experimenting and working through the materials and each of the submissions I have made is a variation and changed project from the last. However, the core of my concept being the unreliable narrator, I quite enjoy the idea of potentially being selected for more than one of these festivals and having the same project in different iterations exhibited at the same time, which really feeds the unreliable nature of the work. Of course, that is quite the long shot but it does create an opportunity to think more about the idea of iteration and how my outcome, if producing more than one, could be different and unique to the others in order to undermine the experience of each person reading it. I imagine, that if it were possible to produce a book that contained a number of wholly unique elements that two persons coming together to talk about the work might bring completely different readings of the work.