Sophia Kavanagh-Ryan’s practice incorporates votive photographs, prints, drawings, paintings and archives of images and objects that explore the fragile polarities of memory and amnesia, identity and anonymity. She collects photographs of those she knows, and those whose images have been abandoned, dividing them in repeated themes such as weddings, first holy communions, and people with dogs. This mix of great rights of passage and the everyday, the posed and the candid, are displayed and remembered side by side, as proxy memorials.
She obsessively cultivates the physical and photographic remains of past lives, as if searching for evidence of her own and others existence. And yet, despite the centrality of biography and testimony in her work, Kavanagh-Ryan’s attempts to preserve what has been lost through time and growth, is the very thing that destroys it. In effect she is creating her own personal mythology, and through its transition from private to public, it becomes almost mirror like. She toys with eerily familiar family photographs, that could easily be mistaken for your own; subverting them through replication and distortion into something that challenges the hushed still image into another form of life, while recognising its new found fictitiousness. Like a precious faded photograph, when no one really knew the person; but they take from the murky greys and grainy blacks, a personality they construct. Something becomes sacred that never existed. An idea of what should be, rather than what is, or what was.
