AfterImage : family folklore and the plurality of memory : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
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Date
2025
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Massey University
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Abstract
AfterImage - Family Folklore and the Plurality of Memory is a site-responsive, archivally motivated investigation of memory and its permeability. It draws upon the narrative legacies of the Moleta family and the Rangitoto ki te Tonga | D’Urville Island property they inhabited throughout the twentieth century. This exegesis examines the complexity of making work that responds to acts of personal and collective remembering. Passing time, discrete perspectives and their influence on memory, and the fickle kinship of memory and truth are discussed. I attend to the uncomfortable history of my colonial settler ancestry, and in conjunction with this, consider female domestic experience through critical analysis of experimental test works that engage with photography and moving image, including Matrilineal Residue and A Family Folklore. The use and manipulation of archival sources is discussed in relation to the work of artist Emily Parr, including my exploitation of biographical objects as indexes of the transmission of intergenerational knowledge. A Lonely Place Facing The Sun and Her Oscillating Care are among the moving image installation works discussed in relation to the intermediality of still photography and moving image combinations, and modes of poetic documentary. The intersecting binary of movement and stillness makes room for a plethora of others - past and present, dead and alive, fixed and transforming. The materiality of light and surface take on new significance, in both moving-still and moving image installation works, leading to ideas about the immersive qualities of digital projection and the occupancy of a darkened three dimensional space. I describe the framework of decision making that leads to metaphorical expressions of memory and time, and the punctuating and repeating moments that hold meaning in the creative work.
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Figures are reproduced with permission.