Moyra Davey ‘On Photography’ - “There is a flânerie of reading that can be linked to the flânerie of a certain kind of photographing. Both involve drift, but also purpose, when they become enterprises of absorption and collecting.“

‘Rosehouse’ is a humid scene imagined through obsessive editing, collecting and remembering. It ties up loose ribbons of separation and memories, harnessing the act of drift, summoning purpose and meaning through contingency. Each image is a swell of pink and purple; tendons, veins, tissue and follicles, drawing womb-like chambers to nestle and crawl into.

These parts play into a stage for the untenable, grasping at blushed corners of the mind to connect dots made vague by years of separation. These small stages become access points for remembering; bougainvillaea pink for mother, green winged gates for sister, purple alchemy for father and prussian blues for my distant sisters. Rosehouse wanders through these small landscapes, knowing they are never virginal, doused in their own tenuous memory, culture and burdens. A gentle reminder to challenge the role of surveyor of anything, no matter how small, when addressing your own wounds.

The landscape is a site for the projection of memory and nostalgia – it is a remembered or imagined scene, a wreath of recollection. Memory is ghostly and untenable, it is the image of a dream, as if it never existed.

Stephanie O'Connor (Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa) is a Pākehā/tangata tiriti artist. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany.

Her work uses the camera as a vehicle to rework memory through obsessive editing, rearranging and revisiting.

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︎@steph_oconnor