Brileigh Hardcastle

Since discovering my family archive, I’ve become of the life of my grandparents – Barbara and Gordon Hart. I spent several years around my grandmother but never my grandfather who often documented the family through slide film. My interest in connecting to the family photographer that predeceases me only grows as I look through these boxes of albums and slides that are stored away in an attic. In an attempt to bring back these memories and understand life in a time before mine, bringing them into colour was the only action that made sense. As opposed to digitally colouring these images in, painting on the photographs made for a more intimate way of working with the photographs by bringing in my hand as an artist into the camera handwork of my grandparents.

The knot that bounds this album of imagery brings these photos back to their origin while allowing the viewer to look more into the materiality of the photo now as painted objects curated in a book.