SPECIAL PROGRAMME 8 JULY-25 AUGUST 2022
Main Gallery

Anna’s Notes,
Brian Magee

brian magee anna's notes

Launch 7th July 2022
Running 8th July-25th August

Childhood is a time of intense emotions discovering the finite nature of life, navigating the ebb and flow of relationships are challenges that every child must encounter providing not only an experience of loss but also an opportunity for growth and development. At certain points in many children’s lives they are provided challenges to their sense of connection with significant other ’s usually the mother or mother substitute and anxiety is very often the result.

This book provides a glimpse of a pivotal stage in my daughter ’s life where she is experiencing and attempting to work through an understanding of her place in the relationship with her mother, father and siblings, and also processing the concept of the finite nature of life and the experience of loss that ensues. This work attempts to document some of the emotions and working through which is necessary on the part of all children to deal with these existential questions. This work is not an attempt at capturing nor representing childhood in all its complexity nor is it an attempt to represent the complexity of my daughter ’s varied experience. It is however an attempt at grasping something of the complexity of relationships and the taking up of one’s place not only within the family unit but eventually wider society.
In our search for meaning we will often find creative ways to cope with and understand our environment and locate our place within it. How we internalise those familial, societal and universal laws of prohibition, the anxiety that ensues and the creative process of working through to a solution is both a personal journey and a universal one. The honesty and openness of my daughters notes which is so indicative of childhood are mirrored in the images themselves. For my daughter her notes to her mother convey something of her own working through and understanding of her place within the desire of her mother and family. The photographs attempt to represent moments where my daughter is tackling some of the complexities of her early life particularly separation anxiety . These notes and photographs were made over a year or so when my daughter was aged seven.