The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows

The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows (2017) consists of photography, moving image and a 3500 word text, inspired by the life and work of the Victorian photographer Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn.

Taking Thereza’s papers, now held in the British Library, as a starting point, the detailed primary research involved in working with this original, handwritten material is corrupted by my own subjective voice, as I insert my own associations and memories into the context of Thereza’s ‘original’.

Moving between different geographical locations, points in time, and subjective positions, the text operates both as a source of information about Thereza and her life as well as a distraction away from it; tangents, interruptions and other forms of aside function as a conceptual device through which a distracted and restless, yet pre-eminently embodied self constructs a non-chronological version of events much of its own making.

Visually, the project combines photographs taken by me at locations associated with Thereza’s life with film stills also made on location, and images sourced from internet searches; photographic representation oscillating between abstraction, pictorialism and illustrative literalism.

The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows explores the relationship between landscape and photography, particularly the mobilization of each as an aesthetic resource as well a physical one, and the various cultural, political and practical uses to which they can be put. Focusing on a moment in the history of photography, both as a technical process, but also as a visual language, the project explores and expands the dialogue between individuals, institutions and other canonical orthodoxies that are asserted in contemporary life, and normalized through notions of custodianship, conservation and care.

• https://www.sophyrickett.com/work#/kmkb_...
• http://www.arts.wales/106868