C&N Assignment – Submission to Tutor.
Isolated…
This set of images comes from the sense of alienation and isolation that I have been feeling over the last 9 months living in Pattaya, Thailand.
I moved here to set up home and re-start my career as a Scuba-Instructor. However, this move pushed my Fiancée, Anastasya, into a long-distance relationship. Although cost of living in Thailand is much less than Hong Kong the move was a gamble and it wasn’t practical for us both to give up out jobs – and she had a stable employment as a live-in nanny.
The images are self-portraits of me doing thing around the house, cleaning, reading, cooking, leaving and returning from work. As this is the area that I find most isolating – most of my work colleagues are settled here with their family. So, it is once I go home and engage in mundane things, that you would normally share with a partner, that I am reminded of that isolation. I am setting up a home ready for my fiancée to be able to move once here current contract finish in 2019 and while I am home, I am constantly reminded of the happy times she brings. While I say I am isolated, I am not lonely or housebound, therefore with these images I wanted to show how Anastasya is part of my life end at a distance through memories.
I did not want to overtly convey loneliness and also, I’m not overly comfortable with my own image in images. Therefore, I was set a challenge to show my home life and what I am constantly reminded that I am isolated from. Looking back over what I had covered in the course I found that “found imagery” had a large part to play in this project. There are many images out there of me having fun with Anastasya, generally, these are taken by friends or by Anastasya herself – I have some of these images on the wall in my apartment. I have chosen to integrate them with images of me at home as a “mosaic” to illustrate how that contributes to the isolation.
The construct of the images gives a slightly hazy feeling to the images – this I admit was not by design, however, I feel that it captures part of the isolation that memories can become hazy at distance.