Lost and Found continued my exploration of family photographs, their relationship with memory and the meaning that is constructed in the gap between the moment of recording and the moment of looking. I tried to find a form that would more powerfully evoke my ideas. Most of the images that comprise this installation are from the early 1960’s. When my parents got divorced in the late 1980’s, my mother, who was the ‘maker’ and ‘keeper’ of the family albums, took them with her. Looking through a cupboard in my father’s house I found a box filled with the photographs and slides that had never quite made it into those albums. I used a selection of these and was interested in how many of them were images of those in-between moments that don’t quite confirm ‘I promise you I am having a perfectly happy childhood – or - a good day at the beach!’ This work won the FNB VITA Art Prize in 2000.

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The work comprises digital prints onto silk organza. Each image measured 3 meters by 2 meters and had to be printed in three sections that I then stitched together. The visible stitching and the frayed edge quality of each image is important to a reading of the work. The images move slightly as viewers walked through the space. They also move in and out of view depending on where you are standing and on the quality of the light as it shifts and changes through the day. Sometimes the images appear to be quite opaque, and at other times they are extremely transparent and almost invisible.