For If you kiss him, you won_t dream

'My mother turned to me and said,

"If you kiss him you won't dream about him."

Well, I couldn't stand him.

He was laying there, in his coffin, stone-cold, I had never felt or seen a dead body before.'

By addressing the legacy of violence within the familial setting, 'If you kiss him, you won't dream about him' disrupts the cycle of insobriety, trauma, self-contempt and negative tendencies which have roamed around my grandmother and mothers' memoirs for many years. The work is a visual response to the indiscernibility of anecdotes within their past lives, an alternative reference that investigates intergenerational conversations. Truth and multiple perspectives interplay significantly on the narrative outcome. With no photographic evidence of these events, the images dramatise and alter the state of truth and history within the family archive. Using visual representations of the recollected stories, where performance and duplicity play critical roles in the act of smoke-screening reality, I play with these modified anecdotes. By reconstructing and simultaneously appearing in these visual plays, I embody the characters and their mannerisms as a means to look back at the choices they have made and question how much of the psychological, genetic past I have carried forward in my own life.