Résidence Astral - Marjolaine Ryley

Saturday 3rd November – Saturday 22nd December 2007

To view a slideshow of the exhibition in situ click here.




Val Williams and Marjolaine Ryley in discussion - Sat 17th November

Marjolaine Ryley’s work explores ideas of memory, history, familial relationships and archival narratives.

The images in the series entitled ‘Résidence Astral’ are all taken in the apartment of the artists grandmother, an archetypal bourgeois dwelling in Brussels, which Ryley has visited since early childhood and which she has documented since 1993 on regular visits from England with her mother. The images explore the interactions between people and space, capturing the psychological charge of the domestic environment, exploring the duality of experience within the familial realm that encompasses the closeness and comfort, as well as claustrophobia and ambivalence that we may feel towards members of our family. These rich and contemplative photographs span a twelve-year period and form part of the artists own family photographic archive

Ryley recently undertook a fellowship with the Photography and Archive Research Centre (PARC) at London College of Communication which looks at the effects of digital technologies on family photography and the shifting nature of these archives in the digital age. As a result a new website research project www.thelastpictureshow.org, is emerging and will be launched at the time of this exhibition. The site will bring together photographic archival collections, writings and artists’ projects, acting as a link between analogue and digital uses of family photography. Résidence Astral is also published as Field Study 7 by PARC.

“Throughout my work there is a strong interest in history and memory both of the individual family and its relation to wider culture. Working with multiple images, grid structures and the book format, allows me to explore the temporal and transient, the indexical and the archival nature of photography. The moving image work brings together past narratives with present places, conflating the two as documentary evidence, while the still images cumulatively narrate familial histories, relationships, exiles and returns.”

Her practice uses photography, super 8, digital video, text, objects and found photographs to explore a range of themes and issues that look at linking her own personal experiences to broader social and political narratives which lyrically move between the personal album and the social document.

Ryley is currently a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Sunderland. Her first monograph ‘Villa Mona – A Proper Kind of House’ was published by Trace Editions in 2006.