Helen Stead

My work explores my own personal family history and I use old family photo albums as a starting point to begin each piece. I generally create work for myself, to help identity with hidden or repressed qualities of my character to help better understand my reality. I want to reflect on my childhood and the transience of youth that seems to flitter past your eyes as you work your way through an old family album. The photographs are tangible memories and it's often hard to even recognize yourself within the photograph. The memories we each have are fragmented, selective and faded - almost like trying to remember the parts of a dream.
The processes I use in my work tries to convey these ideas by taking a snapshot and manipulating it over and over through the use of emulsion transfers, photocopying, scanning and digitally experimenting until what is left is no longer a photograph but a visual trace of a memory. I want my work to evoke the passage of time, through blurred movement and textured surfaces which leave traces of residue of things lost of forgotten. The aim of my work is to provide myself with a form of self-expression while returning the viewer to a specific moment in time, not necessarily a colossal or historical time, ju...

University of Salford
Ba Visual Arts '12