On the Sea Stands a Rock stems from a recent discovery of both familial historical archives and multiple collections of vernacular images from unknown origins. This work forms a project that uses various techniques and processes to explore the idea of a photograph existing as a physical object.

My own photographs respond to the found imagery running throughout the series, creating a varied and experimental flow of works that seek to address and define my interpretation of the photographic object. Unravelling stories from these collections has allowed me to not only explore my own family history, but to look at ideas of lost memory and the lack of identity that comes with these abandoned family albums. – Sam Forsyth-Gray, artist

The work seeks to create new ways of both seeing and understanding these objects by dissecting and intersecting photographic surfaces, through collage and juxtaposition, and the artists own photographic responses. This body of work examines and breaks down the idea of the materiality and the photograph, creating new ways of engaging with the physical print, allowing the viewer to question how images are constructed and consumed.

Through various techniques of removing or interrupting the sense of identity throughout the photographs, they become less about the individual in the image, and the focus is put back on the image itself, as a whole in relation to those around it. My own images respond to archival imagery in a way that is both sculptural and observational, and that ultimately links back to the vernacular objects visually and conceptually.

Overall the work aims to create conversations between new and old images in a way that links them together cohesively both visually and conceptually. The use of traditional collage and juxtaposition along with new and experimental photographic responses seek to keep the work relevant in our increasingly over saturated world of photographic images.