-
Found - aka Puzzle 1 (2003)I was walking home from uni. in the pouring rain, still racking my brains over what project I could do to kick start my adoption art, and there at my feet scattered all over the floor of a busy street/bike lane in Manchester were puzzle pieces laying on the wet pavement. It's not every day i pick stuff off the street but in that moment I was struck with how "fated" it felt. I started frantically picking up the pieces into my shirt and stuffing them into my pocket, and even had a nice passer by how helped, surprisingly. The pieces were soggy and wet and took a few days to dry. I had no idea at all what the puzzle was or whose it was or how it got there and why it was abandoned. -
Found - aka Puzzle 2 (2003)Days later after patiently waiting for the pieces to dry I set about starting to sort out them into piles. I suddenly saw a piece with an eye on it. I was so excited that it was a photo of a person. -
Found - aka Puzzle 3 (2003)I started to bring together the pieces that made up the figure. Originally I thought that putting it together was going to be a piece of cake. I was wrong. Most of the pieces seemed to be huge blocks of the same colour and pattern and I had no guide to help me, and I pretty much accepted the fact that I wouldn't have all the pieces making it even harder. I started to build a face. -
Found - aka Puzzle 4 (2003)Two days later I had put enough together to know that this was a baby! It was one of those moments that seemed so symbolic. I though what were the chances I would be thinking about puzzles, then find this abandoned puzzle on the street where I walked every day and it be a photo of a baby of all things that could have been printed on a puzzle!? -
Found - aka Puzzle (2003)And this was the final outcome! I found out that this was a photo by the famous baby photographer Anne Geddes called 'Waterlily', a photographer who's work I loved growing up. www.annegeddes.com
After the [Pink Rose] project, I didn’t work on adoption as part of my art for two years. In my finial year of my degree I decide that actually adoption was something that I wanted to look at more. I was very stuck at where to start and have pondered for days for ideas.
I would often tell people at uni. that being adopted felt like doing a 1000 piece jigsaw and getting to the end and realising that there is one piece missing (which often happened to me as a kid). I would tear up the whole room looking for the missing piece and may never find it but occasionally years latter I’d find it randomly.
This piece was the what kicked off my adoption work, and it’s an interesting tale of complete coincidences which you can follow on the descriptions below each photo.