British artist Suzannah Pettigrew uses decades of personal and family films as a portal into the hallucinatory world of memory for her new exhibition ‘The End (For Now)’. The work, which spans framed photographic stills, her signature ‘photo-sculpture’ installations and generative poetry pieces, recontextualises films taken by Pettigrew’s grandfather, father, cousins and the artist herself when she was an adolescent.
The images drawn from these homemade films, made on Super 8 and early digital cameras, are tender and ghostly. We see a grainy glimpse of an empty table dressed with a gingham tablecloth and matching plates; a young Pettigrew filming herself in the bathroom mirror, the hefty black camera eclipsing her not-yet-teenage face; a pixelated TV showing sailboats against a black sky, and other quotidian moments from Pettigrew’s early life growing up in the seaside Sussex town of Eastbourne.
