Twenty Versions of an imaginary past explores the affect that histories – be they personal or collective – have on the construction of subjectivity, and in turn, our understanding of time, space our out place within it. 

There are times when I dig back through my old things – clothing, pictures, books.  I search through them, trying to uncover the pieces of the person that keeps disappearing before me.  The age of twenty is filled with thoughts of  complex and intangible things –being at the end and on the edge of something. 

I keep walking past the ghostly faces that appear and then appear to vanish in the photographs that line my mother’s walls.   There are images of my grandmother, my grandmother’s sister and my great grandmother taken forty, sixty, even eighty years before I was born – each woman married, or about to be married at the time when their pictures were taken. 

My mother gives me a sheet of passport photographs taken when she was twenty in 1974.  Wearing a skimpy dress she poses in front of a plush velvet curtain.  She had just returned from London.