Portsmouth Open: Mia Blake

My work explores the family archive and the processes of inheritance and material memory. I am interested in what happens when these images are translated into new physical forms, and how the photographic object can become a vessel for memory rather than simply a record of it.

Alongside the photographs, I incorporate handmade fabrics created by the same family members who captured the images. These textiles function as parallel archives: they carry evidence of touch, labour, time, and presence.

Their material histories intersect with those contained within the photographs, creating a relationship between what is depicted and what is physically inherited.

Through combining photographic processes with textiles, I bring together two forms of familial preservation. The image and the material become intertwined, collapsing distinctions between photograph, object, and memory. This process allows the archive to move beyond documentation and become something tactile, fragmented, and continually changing

The work considers inheritance not as a passive transfer of the past, but as an ongoing process of transformation, in which memories are continually reconstructed through the materials that survive. Working with inherited slide film, I use alternative photographic processes to disrupt the conventional photographic image and expand its material possibilities. By physically altering and recontextualising these images, I explore how memory can shift between generations, and how the act of making can become another form of remembering.