Artist Statement

        Penny Dampier uses the photographic medium to transform and recreate her immediate emotional and physical environment. She attempts to elicit an enigmatic beauty from the mundane and domestic.

        London born and bred, her images are quintessentially English. The birth of her daughter, Alice, in 2008 had a significant impact on her life and is reflected in the subject matter of her work. Using Alice as the focus of many of her images she has been exploring her own childhood reminiscences. She often uses deliberate multiple exposure to give the pictures an unnerving quality and to suggest the blurring of memory.

        Her current work moves on from this to specifically investigate the reconstructed identity of mother and housewife and the limitations and physical boundaries it imposes. She has chosen to illustrate this by photographing and iconizing domestic objects in a sideways look at self-portraiture.

        Thus, in so doing, she has progressed from re-imagining her past experience through the images of her daughter, to a realisation of what she has become. The tangible confines of her present situation have unavoidably brought her practice into clearer focus. This has resulted in a greater emphasis on the politicisation of her domestic existence through her work.

        She has produced a series of large scale colour photographs, measuring 70 x 70 cm. Her preferred method of presentation is to display them in light boxes and exhibit these in a darkened room. Referencing religious iconography and the stained-glass window, the everyday mop, or dustpan and brush are thus elevated from their humble origins.

        She predominantly works with traditional methods of colour photography - using medium format cameras, never cropping the image, and hand-printing. The detail afforded in these analogue images helps to emphasise the importance placed on each object. Moreover, the physical aspect of darkroom printing echoes, to some extent, the daily toil of the housewife.

        She has more recently been using screen-printing to explore new ways of reworking the photographic image.

        Inspired by the work of William Eggleston and Keith Arnatt, she uses colour, composition, and the play of light to imbue her photographs with a painterly quality and transform the ordinary and everyday.