Peter Watkins – Mother Tongue

Watkins’ mother died when he was a child. For more than a decade, he has been using photography to explore the themes of memory, trauma and familial loss, taking as his subject the few possessions that his mother left behind. In an earlier body of work, The Unforgetting, he created still-life images from some of these objects. The resulting photographs bear the unmistakable stamp and style of their maker – the past, viewed through the lens of the photographer’s present. With Mother Tongue, Watkins steps back from the camera and allows his mother’s voice to be heard alongside his own.

The images of his mother’s notebooks, of the shorthand notes and poems that she wrote to herself, and of the audiocassettes on which she recorded herself practicing English grammar – all of these were made on a scanner. They are presented as negative images, although that reversal is not always obvious. What is notable are the themes of untranslatability that unite them – coded messages, abstractions, and exteriors that reveal nothing of their contents. Though they resemble their subjects, they are not documents, but metaphors for absence and loss.