Family Album
An artist turning their eye on their own immediate family is a well explored theme, but Tim Cragg has achieved the sublime with a multi decade long commitment to document the intimate lives of his nearest kin through birth, sickness, love, and absence.
With a fixed camera position, the artist reveals the transformation of a living room, a mundane domestic space into a room where new life is born. It shows the fragility of what is so every day and normal evolving into something hugely spectacular and magical. A new relationship is formed not only between the parent and new child but also between the two siblings.
Tim Cragg focuses his lens on his two children, Calypso and Artemus. This body of work spans a twelve-year period, and continues to be a work in progress. Whilst the camera captures the sibling’s relationship and the poignancy of childhood and its development, it also exists through a process of making images together, an inclusive act of the participation of a father with his children.
These images serve as a constructed memory bank for the future relationship between his two children, they help create a family mythology, a strengthening of the memory bank of what their relationship was like growing up. This is in line with the memory that the artist has with his own siblings, and the importance that this has served in growing up with experiencing such long absence and separation from his own parents whilst being sent abroad to boarding school from an early age.
Being absent, separated, has been an occurring theme in the artist’s life. Having been sent abroad to boarding school at eight the cycle of leaving loved ones has deep grooves. As an adult, working as a cinematographer the artist spends eight to ten months away on work assignments.
Self-portraits taken in various hotel rooms depict the artist as a silhouette, trapped in the hotel room, often looking out the window or reaching out to the outside world.