Moiety is a project that navigates the emotional and psychological terrain of paternal absence.
Rooted in personal experience, the work explores the lingering imprint of a father who left before I was born—a presence felt only through silence, fragments, and speculation. Taking its title from a word meaning ‘half’ or ‘part,’ Moiety addresses the unresolved tension of knowing only one side of my history and the complex, often intangible effect that absence has on identity formation.
The work began as a quiet, meditative enquiry into what it means to grow up fatherless within a society structured by patriarchal values. In a culture that glorifies paternal power as foundational to identity, legitimacy, and belonging, what does it mean to be without that anchor? It is underpinned by psychological research into the developmental effects of fatherlessness on daughters, and draws conceptually on Freud’s theory of ‘the Uncanny’.
Taking a single wedding photograph as a starting point I use collage, experimental photography, and found images, merging self-portraiture with archival material to stage fictional encounters and imagined genealogies. Sourcing images of men who share my father’s name, alongside vintage family snapshots, I insert myself into scenes and rephotograph the results—giving imagined realities a photographic weight, and asking us to consider Scruton’s proposal that ‘if the photograph is a photograph of a subject, it follows that the subject exists’. Throughout the series, I physically cut into self-portraits and family photos, mirroring the fragmented nature of memory and identity. These gestures act as metaphors for rejection and the confused inheritance of an absent lineage, while experimental photographic works attempt to visualise the intangible weight of absence itself.
Presented as a hand-bound book, Moiety brings these elements into dialogue, physically threading together a reimagined narrative, interweaving the visual work with written fragments capturing the emotional undercurrent of my attempt to make sense of my identity and find my place within an incomplete history.
Moiety
Mixed media 100x130cm
