Sedgeway, Crabbetts Marsh PHO 730 Sustainable Strategies
MA in Photography Sarah Padilha
Statement of Intent
At the tender age of 53, I became orphaned by the death of my mother who had survived my father by 7 years. Losing the people who brought us into this world is a universal experience which, even when expected, leaves us in deep shock and unprepared for the waves of intense grief that follow.
Much of my childhood and subsequent adolescent holidays were spent as a family in and around the Norfolk Broads. A beautiful and unique ecosystem of inland waterways where sustainability is a way of life. It seems fitting that as I attempt to sustain the threads of my memories of my father’s home, it should be here. Sustaining life in all ways.
Sedgeway itself was built at the beginning of the tourism era in the 1930s and the house still has the furniture that was brought to the house from my grandmother’s home when my father bought the house. Recycling was very much the norm for those living after the blitz of the Second World War. The absence of life feels heavy – a lifetime and era now past but sits as a testament to the period little transformed by the passage of time.
This project aims to capture some of the inaccessibility to the people passed through visual narrative: a life lived and lost leaving behind personal belongings in one of the most amazingly serene environments that I was blessed to share, and love, with my father, and now with my brother.
Reading relevant literature written during this period of 1930s and also 1950s when my parents first met, feels really appropriate. Notably, Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ and C.S. Lewis’s ‘A Grief Observed’ have resonated well with me.
Many photographers such as Marjolaine Ryley, Lydia Goldblatt, Larry Sultan, Gilbert McCarragher, William Eggleston, Celine Marchbank have all beautifully photographed family homes. In undertaking my project, my eyes are different, my context is different and my take on how to present Sedgeway is different. The visual strategy is to shoot images specifically either at dusk or dawn for soft light and often mist feeling appropriate to capture my still raw and honest emotions, giving a gentle, painterly impressionist feel.
By rephotographing many of my family archive photographs, I hope to honour my parents and my irreplaceable moments of childhood reflecting the powerful connection between place, memory and identity. Through the actual process of photography, the project has provided a space to reflect, mourn and express my unspoken emotions of grief with its inevitable deep sadness. Grief doesn’t exist without love and it is only this that provides the possibility to savour memories etched into the walls, the waters and objects that remain.
My hope is to connect with the viewers’ own experience, providing an opportunity for sharing a place of empathy and understanding.
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
The Waves, Virginia Woolf, 1931
