2015 – 2016

Beloved Curve examines the transitory nature of human life in relation to the cyclical, regenerative natural world. It also chronicles my attempts to come to terms with the death of my father, Michael, in 2004. By creating a dialogue between my father’s photographed past and my own immediate present, the images reflect the process of mourning that has encroached my life and retreated in equal measure since his death.

I decided to explore the trajectory of my father’s life as a narrative that I could access episodically, through family photographs and my own memories. Making double exposures first by photographing the original images, then making new photographs on the same film, I wanted to create strange composites that echo the complicated, hidden workings of human memory, in which distant moments exist side by side, oblivious to the passing of time.

Both memorial and celebration, the work reflects the reiterative nature of mourning: remembering and forgetting; invoking and suppressing. The silent pervasiveness of nature permeates the images which at once portray my father’s life and my present without him. Some images depict him clearly, his features perfectly recollected. Others leave him indistinct, as my memory of his physicality is eroded by time, his reality slowly reclaimed by the natural world, receding into the past as my own trajectory continues into the future.

Sarah Fishlock is from Glasgow, Scotland. She works with photography, found images, and published texts to create images that explore the relationship between the individual and wider socio-historical realities, tensions between individual and familial identity, and the trickiness of memory. Recipient of the 2016 Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award, Sarah was previously shortlisted for the 2015 Magnum Graduate Award and was a finalist in the 2014 Magnum/Ideastap Photographic Award. Her projects have been featured in Foto8, the Independent on Sunday, BBC News in Pictures, The Guardian and Der Greif. Her work has been exhibited at British Council Gallery (New Delhi, India), Landskrona Foto Festival (Landskrona, Sweden), the Consul’Art (Marseille, France), and the Scottish Parliament (Edinburgh, United Kingdom). Sarah serves as editor of Glasgow photography magazine Goose Flesh.