This portrait marks a threshold between two lives. Based on a photograph taken before my mother left Hong Kong. The original, a late 1950’s black-and-white image is transformed into colour. Past and present occupy the same surface, held in tension rather than separation. Behind this transition lies the legacy of the second world war, Japanese occupation and loss; ahead, the possibility of a different future centred on her choosing to marry and the hope of spiritual nurture and family.
Presented as a distressed photograph, almost a museum artefact, the work explores the fragility of memory and the way images preserve, distort and reanimate the past. The figure is painted at half my mother’s height (4ft 11inches - 149 cm), reinforcing the relationship between time, presence and absence. The gold leaf lining the inner frame evokes a continuous thread of hope, connecting what has been lived through to the present.
