Following my folio presentation in class yesterday, a friend suggested that I look into Anat Cossen’s work. Anat is an artist and a lecturer at Photography Studies College. I don’t know her in person but after having a read of these lines and browsing her exhibition work, I feel I do.

“Following my return from a visit to my birth country I was struggling to settle back and resume normal life. The night became time for processing emotions and images poured from me, my unconscious was speaking. It was an intuitive process and a way to reconnect with my identity, with this land, with the life I have made here.”
This is how Anat has described her work titled “Transition”…

The transition is ever painful for some of us and many lives it in unspoken words. Someone so expressive about her feelings, I often felt and talked about this feeling of “dislocation” “not belonging” “homesickness”. And when you add homesickness to it all, it comes with a new dimension; I don’t believe the land that I’m homesick for is ever going to be the same as it was once. My father will never be there again, I will never do my homework in the fading light of a gas lamp. This feeling of being in one place but not fully be present and imagine another which doesn’t exist anymore is a dark richness in its own. I’m surrounded with these melancholic storm of feelings not necessarily blue but heavy weight nevertheless.

“Two Feet Apart” will be a body of work exploring my own emotions depicting this journey of dislocation and belonging or therefore the lack of it.

“It felt a pang – a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I’d first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever”
Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag.