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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.
Raised in South Australia and now living and working in London, Odette is interested in the complexities of recording and assigning identity through photography, and how it can reflect, misrepresent or complicate a situation. She uses the camera as her tool for probing the difficult relationship between the image and the ‘real’, and for rediscovering who we think we are versus who others say we are.
For 2009 she has been awarded a six-week Artist Research Residency by the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts, to live and work in the Australian desert.
Odette’s debut UK solo exhibition will be held at Durham Art Gallery, Durham, from 10 January to 8 February 2009.
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+44 (0) 789 458 4245
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www.odetteengland.com |