Notes from Home
Fox, Anna (2008) Notes from Home. [Book art/Artist's book, Exhibition/show, Installation, Photography]
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Notes from Home is an installation of five hand-made photobooks presented on domestic-style shelves. It represents a new turn in my exploration of autobiographical storytelling. Using material shot in the early 2000s – mostly unseen until this work – the project focuses in minute detail on the tiny stories present in everyday life within a domestic interior. In a development from my earlier projects on cockroaches and cupboards, Notes from Home concentrates more on banal events dramatised through vivid colour and close-up photography.
The five series are: Gifts from the Cats (dead animals of various sorts); Making Cakes (eccentric cakes made with my youngest son); The Rise and Fall of Father Christmas (the making of a papier-mâché life size FC by my older son over a period of months and then its demise); Pete's Food and Flowers (obsessive dinners made and flowers picked by the lodger) and Super Snacks (me eating personally constructed snacks).
A small selection of the original photos was published as single images in my monograph Anna Fox Photographs 1983 (ed. Val Williams, Photoworks, 2007). However, the final project only emerged with the subsequent production of the concertina books. These introduce a narrative structure that brings together a vast number of previously unseen images, combining them with short texts at the end of each sequence. Notes from Home was first realized in its current form as an installation/book project in 2008 for the exhibition Cockroach Diary and Other Stories, and was re-exhibited in the Deutsche Börse Prize 2010. Its development in an exhibition setting provided my first opportunity to fully explore installation as a central part of a photographic work. The installation of the books on shelves designed to look like those in a domestic setting is integral to the meaning of the work as a whole.
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