I developed this project after discovering an area of ruined towns in Sicily. They were destroyed by a series of earthquakes and subsequently abandoned.

I felt a strong connection, as if I had been in that earthquake and experienced the trauma of sudden loss and displacement myself.

I carry with me the inherent trauma that my mother experienced when, as a twelve year old, she lost her home at the hand of the Nazis. Even though this wasn't my own experience, it instilled in me a perpetual feeling of loss and homelessness. This could well be a case of epigenetic inheritance.

My project concentrates on a set of negatives which I found among the debris of the disaster zone. Some images reveal traces of the portrayed people, others have been transformed into rather intriguing abstract pictures. Nature has scratched and drawn and painted onto them, playing with the represented people, cutting right through their bodies and shrouding them in mist.

'Seismic Shift' aims to draw the viewer into a world of discovery, with some uncertain, contradicting, dark, maybe even scary elements and to make sense of them in their own way, to feel rather than understand what happens when your world changes to something hardly recognizable and how to try and cope with it, accepting change and maybe discovering something interesting, something positive, some unexpected beauty.

The work is divided into five sections plus a text spread. The sections deal with different aspects and can be seen in any order or on their own.

I RUDERI - things fall apart

BUIO - facing the unexplicable

VOLTI - those who were there

DIMENTICARE - fading into oblivion

CORAGGIO - faith in the unexpected