Trish Morrissey

Biography

Trish Morrissey works with photography, film and video. She has exhibited around the world, including solo shows at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK; Pumphouse Gallery, London, UK; Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, USA; Gallery of Photography, Dublin, Ireland; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia.

Her work is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, USA; the National Media Museum, Bradford; and the Wilson Centre for Photography, London. Her work has been featured in several anthologies, including Vitamin Ph, Survey of International Contemporary Photography (Phaidon Press, 2006) and The Photograph as Contemporary Art, by Charlotte Cotton (Thames & Hudson, 2005).

For more information, visit Trish Morrissey's website here

Artist Statement

Front deals with the notion of borders, boundaries and the edge; using the family group and the beach setting as metaphors. For this work, the artist travelled to beaches in the UK and around Melbourne. There, she approached families and groups of friends who had made temporary encampments, or marked out territories and asked if she could be part of their family temporarily. Morrissey took over the role or position of a woman within that group - usually the mother figure. The artist asked to take the place of themother figure, and to borrow her clothes. The mother figure then took over the artist's role and photographed her family using a 4x5 camera (which Morrissey had already carefully set up) under the artist's instruction. While Morrissey, a stranger on the beach, nestled in with the mother figure's loved ones.

These highly performative photographs are shaped by chance encounters with strangers, and by what happens when physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. Ideas around the mythological creature the 'shape shifter' and the cuckoo are evoked. Each piece within the series is titled by the name of the woman who the artist replaced within the group.