ALEXANDRA MILLS
Visual Artist

This body of two and three dimensional work looks to the past as a source of images and visual language.

It concerns the effects of materials to produce an insight or a memory of a subject and derives from a small photograph taken in about 1910 of my grandmother's family; unsmiling and squinting in the sun. It is a relic of the family and is damaged from folding and repairs to its surface.  Treating the photograph as an artefact, I made some drawings of this damage marks on its surface and others that incorporate these marks as visual elements.

The work also draws on clothing, artefacts, housing, landscape, faces, and figures that are in, or associated with, the photograph.

The largest series is a group of seven drawings representing members of the family through the clothes they wear in the photograph.

Acknowledging the way that materials can evoke memories, I used materials available to the people in the photograph - paper, timber, clay, muslin, tarletan, string and wax.

By evoking people now lost through materials and context, rather than likenesses, these works are a form of 'circumstantial' portraiture.