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Odette England
'Crash Markers'
Crash markers - standard guideposts that mark the sites of serious and fatal car accidents - act as an important part of the grieving process of bereaved families and friends of crash victims. But their primary function is to serve as a public safety message, not to memorialise those who didn’t arrive. I am intrigued by this: the ‘standardisation’ of the nature and location of roadside memorials.
There is nothing standard about a car crash. In my experience, what confounded me was the bombardment of images in my mind that intertwined somehow with was going outside the car as it flipped and rolled. They are hazy, jumbled and distorted visions, but I cannot forget them.
Crash markers have an interesting ‘space’ as a fragment of history. I’m no stranger to the places in my images where these markers reside – they punctuate roads where I grew up – but I am a stranger to the people involved. And while the markers tell me something of the surrounding landscape, they do not make their secrets explicit.
This series deals with my inability to forget physical detail and incident. I use my creativity to reinterpret the series of random ‘snapshots’ of my life that piled rapidly into my mind at the time of my own car accident, by creating new memories based on the locale of the fates of others. A sort of reinterpretation of the landscape through the memory of private ‘flashes’.
The images act as a lone celebration of unfinished trips. A mourning and tribute, coupled with an appreciation of my own destiny. Visiting these sites made me see that victims would not go unnoticed – and that this would apply to me, too. Standing beside the crash markers and creating still images as incomplete, very personal narratives, I investigate itinerary, identity and interaction.
Overall, paying attention to where others had been, which I caught only photographically, made me feel more ‘here’, more certain and more enlightened generally. It fits with my interest in signs and symbols placed not to put us in mind of things not present but, rather, to make clearer to us things that are present.
Odette is an English/Australian photographer and writer living and working in London. She is a recent photography graduate of City of Westminster College and has exhibited in galleries in Europe and the US, most recently at the Margate Rocks festival in Kent, the Mirror for the 21st Century exhibition in New Orleans and at the Rhonda Schaller Studio, New York. She has also been published in Ag magazine (Spring 2008, Number 51) and will be undertaking sponsored artist residencies this year in Hungary, Greece and Spain. Her works have also been chosen to be in the 'New Wave' exhibition at Bute Space Gallery, Cardiff, celebrating new breakthrough artists.
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+44 (0) 789 458 4245
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www.odetteengland.com |