Brileigh Hardcastle

After my grandmother passed away, I became eager to look through our family archives and see the life she lived through photography. Through this, I also discovered a lot about my grandfather who I never got the chance to meet and had a significantly larger photo archive than the rest of the members of my family. After looking through boxes, carousels and compartment files of slides I had access to a period of time that existed before my own. I discovered the day to day, monumental, and tender moments of Barbara and Gorden Hart. I wonder what lay next for these boxes of photographs that were stuffed away in our family attic. I wanted to bring life back into the images, as a means to connect with people I had little to no memory of.

As opposed to digitally colouring these images in, painting on the photographs is 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 binds 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 a painted object curated in a book. The images consist mostly of portraits of Barbara and Gordon in places and poses that reflect one another, as if they were having a heart-to-heart.