Millie Burton - Statement The series General Effects is an emotional response to the impending loss of my grandmother's house, a place I have known all my life. She moved into this house in 1956, the year Britain invaded Suez and Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. But while half a century of history has raced by in the outside world, inside, the only effect of the passing years seems to have been a gradual accumulation of things, dust and time. My images explore the claustrophobic edges of this rural post-war household where nothing is thrown away. Attics and corridors where hoarded objects form unintended sculptures and seem to harbour distant memories of functional existences. These awkward spaces are crammed with colours, textures and bulky forms - an iridescent pheasant salvaged from the roadside, a frayed bicycle tyre protecting the edge of a step, a radiant blue mattress sandwiched between boxes in the old stables, a carpet rolled up and kept for an unidentified purpose... In a disposable world, these objects and their surroundings take on an absurd pathos, a mute (yet somehow resentful) acceptance of their fate. Photographing them is akin to hoarding; a futile attempt to freeze the process of decay, to "preserve them like flies in amber... unchanged while the world around continues to change". (1) In a modern world of interiors where household goods are replaced rather than repaired, we are losing what Susan Sontag called the "used things, warm with generations of human touch". General Effects investigates the connections between objects, memories and imagined narratives, and considers notions of accumulation, thrift, disposal, waste and recycling. (1) Metz, C., 'Photography and Fetish', in Wells, L., The Photography Reader. Routledge 2003, p141 |
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