Somewhere…fast  Belfast Exposed Photography

From what fabric are these compliant but quietly troubling images woven? How is it that we are ready to believe that we have, at one level, been there before? Perhaps these traces of apparent familiarity are left from a short story half remembered, or a film- remnants of moments just before or just following the dramatic act. Maybe they flow from pictures from family stories, frequently retold, or else from transitory incidents in our personal past that we no longer credit as fully real, so merged and mediated have they become through the flux of memory. Unusual circumstances bring us to occupy these spaces and, especially if we are alone, we become particularly sensitive to the details of furnishing and to the specifics of the light and the view from the window in these places provided for the intimate acts of sleeping, or taking a meal. We are intensely aware of the artificial state of this ambience; this is not our bedroom, not our ‘sitting’ room because there is nothing of the accumulated random detail that reflects the myriad facets of a personal history. Instead, there is that frisson of suppressed acknowledgement that we are merely transitory ‘guest’ in rooms that have borne, without remark, the traces of a hundred previous occupancies. [ from catalogue essay Robert Radford: The Borrowed Spaces of Mary Maclean ].

Somewhere…fast 13 August – 24 September 2004 Belfast Exposed Photography