Contact

This work started out as a response to the covid pandemic but it has shifted in my mind as I continue to make images. It was initially prompted by reading an article on contact tracing. I was struck by the fact that as humans, we need skin to skin contact to thrive and even the most anti-social of us occasionally like a hug because it's crucial to our wellbeing to connect with others on some level. And yet here we were being told to avoid contact. I started to think about things that I'd never given thought to before - who has previously touched this shopping trolley/ATM/railing? How would I know? How would I find out? What have they left behind? I've often previously looked at traces of human activity in the landscape - litter left behind, impressions of tent pegs, a worn down stone step. Now I was being asked to think about and avoid the almost invisible traces left by persons unknown everywhere I went. This train of thought went on for some time and I finally came round to thinking about 'the fingerprint' as a means of identifying someone and as a marker of existence, proof, documentation. I set about capturing the fingerprints that I and my family left behind in our home as went about our daily activities. I cleaned surfaces and came back to photograph them 24 hours later to see what marks we'd made on the surfaces that make up my home. I stuck up sheets of acetate on areas we touch frequently but where the fingersprints weren't really easily photographed, and then photographed the acetate. I'm still doing this but I feel as if these images are now taking on a different aspect. They are still proof of our existence, tracking and tracing our activities but they are also a documentation of inhabitance, they are in a way a gesture of what it is to be at home.