My work explores ideas of memory, history, familial relationships and archival narratives. My practice uses photography, super 8, digital video, text, objects and found photographs to explore a range of themes and issues that look at linking my own personal experiences to broader social and political narratives.  My work moves between the personal album and the social document.

Throughout my work there is a strong interest in history and memory both of the individual family and its relation to wider culture. Working with multiple images, grid structures and the book format, allows me to explore the temporal and transient, the indexical and the archival nature of photography. The moving image work brings together past narratives with present places, conflating the two as documentary evidence, while the still images cumulatively narrate familial histories, relationships, exiles and returns. The work can be read as sitting between fact and fiction, past and present, the real and the imaginary.

“Photographers’ interests shift continuously. A new emerging generation of photographers have begun to look sideways at the family, working on ideas of memory and object. Projects such as Marjolaine Ryley's ongoing Villa Mona discusses the relationship between a place and its actuality…. Photographers have perhaps in recent years taken a step back from family portraiture and are looking obliquely at the domestic. Rather than the ‘now’ there is a sense of history, of things half remembered, ambiguous, enigmatic. The anxiety and drama which so informed family photography in the 1980s and 1990s has been replaced by a highly directed melancholy, a collection of ghosts.”

Val Williams, Ghost Worlds: Photography and the family, Exit magazine ‘Family’ issue 20

“The photograph makes a promise of history it cannot keep. There is certainly a sense in which the disarticulated fragments to which so may post war artists have been drawn can be read as a metaphor for the unruly processes of memory and the traumatising of historical continuity. Indeed there are strong parallels between photography’s emphasis on incidental details and the involuntary memory fragments that are the raw materials of psychoanalysis. It is a matter of putting the parts together and inserting them into language: a task that is left to the viewer of the photo fragments

David Campany, Art and Photography. Phaidon