About The forgotten mandala's
On my journey to wanting to become a family photographer it became abundantly clear that the family portrait is a romanticised version of your family dynamic. I try to capture the good along with the hard times of motherhood. This series jump started when I came across a folder of images I had saved of my son Kadyn, the file's name; “Kadyn's Tantrums”. I had completely forgotten about his habit of lying on the ground and not moving when he didn’t get his own way. I don’t want to forget these types of memories.
Buddhist’s would create these beautiful mandala’s as a form of meditation. I merged this idea into my own. I took my old banal forgotten snapshots and spent the time manipulating (meditating) and also remembering the moment behind them. I am the only one that knows what images went into each one and in turn reminding me of the photos existence and the memory behind those particular images.
We often use photographs as proof, whether it be proof of a crime or proof of how happy you are or how great your life is. I think we capture a moment on a camera or phone and it is only as important as you make that memory in your own mind. For instance, you're going to remember a family trip due to a photo hanging on your lounge wall compared to another image of a child's first lost tooth left in your phone. Both are different, important family memories but one's importance has been placed above the others.
And that is what I’m trying to achieve with my pieces here. I’m trying to bring some of the importance back into the banal forgotten images by shedding the romanticised images and replacing them with visually glitched and manipulated images to show you a better representation of what our memory actually does.
“A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent. You will get nowhere, for instance, by taking a magnifying glass to it to get a closer look: you will see only patches of light and dark, an unreadable mesh of grains.”
Annette Kuhn - Remembrance, The child I never was - The photography reader, Liz wells, editor
If you are interested in joining in this project and having some of your own forgotten images turned into beautiful mandala's then send through a message and I can send you further information about it.
Explore the Mandala's already made so far
The mandala's below are a mixture of single, double, and triple images made into my own special code to produce these beautiful. Every mandala is unique.