*Lossed* {2022}. 6-colour reduction lino print on Fabriano Tiepolo paper, edition of 9. SOLD.

This book is about losses: lost chances, lost communication, lost relationships.

You look at them both in this photograph and they seem so in love: Dad’s gaze is tender; Mum’s is playful and maybe a bit shy. Not that shy, as they already knew she was pregnant with me when they got married… but even so. It’s a photograph that captures the start of something. Mum’s wearing a dress she made herself, Dad’s in his dress kilt. His childhood friend Tom was his best man and the photographer. It’s beautiful.

The structure of the book underscores their deaths and their distance. The layers of the reduction print reduce as they reach the back of the book, leaving only a ghost trace on the final print – which is the only print to be ‘whole’. On all the other pages, Mum and Dad are separated by the book’s structure, gazing across at each other as the shades of grey bleed out of the images. You can read the unfolding sequence as both death and time: Mum died 19 years before Dad, and he quietly left behind the business of living once she’d gone.

Making the book has forced me to look at them both. I have a photograph in which they are both clearly happy and in love. The photograph I am using as a source is both the truth and a lie: its precise outlines hide the lack of information. Just the love they had at that moment shines through, whatever else happened afterwards.