Alexa Wright

‘All That’s Left Behind’ is a series of seven digitally manipulated colour photographs that draw a parallel between the inheritance of physical objects and the familial inheritance of psychological and emotional traits, traumas and impressions. Collectively the images convey a sense of loss, but they also arouse our curiosity about the various personal and cultural histories evoked by the different objects depicted. 

The extraordinary location for these images is a house in which a very old person has recently died, leaving a massive amount of belongings dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These include valuable original artworks; artifacts from other cultures; worthless knickknacks; objects of style and objects of bad taste. Some of the objects are arranged in cabinets or on walls, but many are arbitrarily piled on top of one another. There is a wealth of symbolic potential amongst these seemingly randomly arranged objects, which have been photographed more or less as they were found. A female figure has been digitally inserted into several (but not all) of the images. The woman, whose identity is never quite clear, is only partially visible at the very edge of the frame. Appearing like a kind of ghost or spectre, she is present within, but does not quite inhabit, a space which may be that left by her ancestors. 

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7 x Digital colour prints, 80 x 60cm.