This series of still life images feature the overlooked, the forgotten. Many of the objects would usually be discarded and have no intrinsic value, yet other objects make connections between people and places.

This series, _House Keeping_ has been made over several years. Usually the scenarios are happened upon, noticing familial groups lit only by natural light, in a corner of a familiar or unusual setting. My work is long-form, ongoing chapters that connect and collide with the repeated themes, remembered, or observed. Often, the considered slowness of the work itself is reflected in the groups of objects which relate to the home, both personal and more universal. Mortality and memory form the basis of all the work I make. The objects are usually significant, they belonged to my mother or grandmothers, and explore the idea of what we choose to keep over time. I am interested in the notion of display in a home setting, the placing of valued objects and the idea of keeping house, living an ordered and clean life, keeping up appearances, the loss of the original location and the idea of the object continuing to represent a particular person. 

The light in each scene is an equal subject. It is this quality of light and the way the light dances through each image that keeps the attention and allows one to explore and examine the exquisite detail of the objects laid out in each tableau. Proust in _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,_

describes objects on a table in the sun, he poetically describes the light, “the bell-tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted it’s yellow velvet.” 

House Keeping

These photographs connect to fragments of memory. The unrelated objects together activate memory, they trigger a response to something from the past, heightening a sense of loss, an ephemeral disappearance. My photographs invoke questions and I experiment with subject matter and process. 

This series is an ongoing body of work, using a variety of processes, scanning, cyanotypes, film, digital and photograms. Each process represents my journey through photography while exploring the relationship between mother and daughter and the intersection between of both women.

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Heather McDonough

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