Wounds.
"Is photography a wounding technology? Not necessarily. Jason Bate has collected stories from the relatives of injured First World War servicemen and discovered that domestic photography played an important role in easing their way back in to family and social life. Carefully including them in the small rituals of photographing significant family events could have a healing effect for someone with severe facial injuries.
Deborah Padfield has been using photography to try and visualise chronic pain. Unlike a typical injury, with a known origin, chronic pain causes "a crisis in meaning making" because it has no obvious cause. Working with patients, she has been trying to find a way to represent it and thereby help them articulate their experience of this debilitating and destabilising condition.
Gareth McConnell’s work Survivors first appeared in Source in 1998 to coincide with his exhibition Anti-Social Behaviour at Photo Museum Ireland. His new series, In the Shadow of the Butterfly Bush, explores the same subject matter two decades on. It was commis- sioned by Northern Ireland Alternatives, a restorative justice charity that works within communities to collectively address the hurt and damage that is the legacy of conflict and social deprivation. Fionna Barber, who has written about art and post-conflict trauma in Northern Ireland, introduces the work. In the portrait diptychs at the heart of this project "the richly saturated closeups of buddleia flowers are silent witnesses to the unspoken traumas that dwell behind the faces of McConnell’s sitters".
Ala Buisir’s work Tint of Trauma documents the experience of three women whose lives have been shattered by the ‘War on Terror’. The work builds on Buisir’s experience recording testimony while working on a project by the Bezna Theatre, The People’s Tribunal on Crimes of Aggression: Afghanistan Sessions A Durational Artistic Tribunal. The work is introduced by Joanna Bourke, author of Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading our Lives."The photographs are shadowy traces of experience, juxtaposed with eloquent comments by the three women about how their lives have been transformed by discrimination and hyper-surveillance".
Suella Holland’s A Joining of Self was produced as part of her MFA in Photography at Ulster University during which she explored photography and stitching as a means of articulating childhood trauma. "Making photographs assists in regaining a sense of control and can help process emotions and experiences that have been unspeakable, whilst stitching on to the image or including stitched words as part of the image aids in the reconnection of self". The work is introduced by Jennifer Good whose research is about the photographic representation of conflict. "Having worked for some years on photographing the desolation of abandoned Irish houses (and there is no silence like the silence in Irish houses, abandoned or not), she now puts herself into the picture, in order to find her way out".
