‘Towards the end ‘ is both personal and political, moving between personal and communal narratives; a large tableau in 4 parts, the fragmentation of the felted jigsaw portraits describe the gradual breakdown before death of one person – my mother, but is also a statement about the over representation of black people in the mental health system.
One of my favourite writers, bell hooks, articulates so well the role of photography in the process of decolonisation, in “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life*, and the necessity of reclaiming the past through the ‘re-membering’ of fragments into a whole.
Towards The End reclaims an identity erased by the social forces of disenfranchisement as much as by illness, not only through the photographic image but also the re-presentation of the image through the medium of felting.
Maggie Scott . France. April 2014
*bell hooks, (1995). In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life, in hooks, b. ‘Art on My Mind: Visual Politics’. New York: New Press, pp. 54-64.
