Gemma Warren

Gemma Warren follow British, born 1989

Lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Projects/Portfolios

Left Behind/Year Zero

Introduction

Artist Statement
1. Year Zero: A Prison With No Walls

Year Zero: A Prison With No Walls is a reflection on the relationship between memory, trauma, past, and present. The work focuses specifically on the repercussions of political conflict regarding the Khmer Rouge genocide, which took place throughout Cambodia from 1975 - 1979. The photographs within this series use the landscape as a visual tool to create engaging photographs that document the present while incorporating direct quotes from the survivors. In doing this, the work aims to question the gap between what lies beneath the surface of the image - the landscape, and the present that conceals the past. The full body of this work will be exhibited at the RIC Gallery as a multi-media exhibition between February - March 2013.

2. Left Behind

When I was fourteen my mother was diagnosed with cancer. When I was fifteen my mother was in remission, and when I was sixteen the cancer came back. She died when I was seventeen.

In the months before my Mother died we talked about how she felt about facing death. My mother had lost both of her parents by her early twenties and she told me she wasn’t scared because she knew it was harder to be left behind than to leave. We knew that we were both facing death. For her that journey was coming to an end but I didn’t realize the consequences of being left behind untill after she had gone.

Death is a natural and expected part of life, but so often it is ignored. We find ourselves incapable of facing it’s realities and consequences. Rather than engage in the shared experience, we endure the pain alone and suffer in silence. After losing my Mother I was forced to accept this realization for myself. It’s often expected that by a certain age death becomes a reality - a body well-lived must come to an end eventually, and saying good-bye seems inevitable. But when life is taken from someone at an early age, prematurely, unexpectadely - no one can find the words to comfort that gap, that pain.

As a young adult I slowly began to realize just how many of my friends had also lost someone in their family, and it became a large surprise to understand that I was not alone. In the US alone, 1.2 million children will lose a parent to death before age 15, and last year 400,000 people under twenty-five had lost a loved one. The project that started as a way to document the number of young people suffering loss very quickly began to evolve and became so much more than a photograph. The time spent with each friend became more than a photographic exchange. It became a rare and precious exchange of experience, sometimes never shared before. It became a healing process, and the camera became a tool for conversation. The process of this led me away from the image itself, and although the final product of this series lies as an image, it became about the time shared between two individuals, and the conversations existing ing in that space.

This is where the photograph fails. The photograph cannot emulate the experience or try to educate the outsider or viewer. What it can do is document, and evoke thought. I cannot share the individual experience of each of these people, but I can show, that even through the most difficult of situations, no one is alone. When people come together to share and live through life-changing experiences, something shifts. An understanding forms, and slowly you become aware that you are not so alone.

I am not trying to share the individual experiences these people lived through, but show through use of individual images, displayed together, that beauty can be found in the togetherness of being alone. When people come together to share and live through life-changing experiences, something shifts. An understanding forms, and slowly you become aware that you are not so alone.

These are the people left to bare the consequences of death.
These are the people left behind.