AMANDA DENNY
visual storyteller

Meanwhile

Meanwhile is the umbrella term for this multi-faceted work in progress, which began as a response to activating our archives, collaboration and the pandemic - the last, an ongoing period of ever changing restriction and of confinement with its challenges for image making. Our support structures and sense of isolation feel toyed with in such unfamiliar circumstances and for too many then exacerbated by family bereavements and their traumatic consequences. The work considers issues of mental real estate and wellbeing, where memory and nostalgia create their own fictitious overlay. It considers how differently we all view a single set of circumstances depending upon our own assumptions and prejudices.  Sometimes implanting false memories into our minds so they become the reality we want or need to believe. Enforced aloneness extends the arena for internal monologues and sometimes to the point where you question whether the dialogue been shared only in an interal headspace or aired via real conversation and interaction with another. Meanwhile is an auto-fiction, but on airing Amanda hopes the viewer can find a space for alternative narratives to form by  interacting with the image and textual entrances offered. 
 

The work became a greater collaboration through a focused call out for text contributions during April 2020.  The 'brief' was broad: whether a piece of writing, literature, poetry, lyrics or of noticiing something that was now missed or not.  The text was either a response to the first unfamiliar lockdown circumstances or taken from the contributors' own personal archive. Amanda would like to thank all those who responded, for their imagination and kindness.

Like much of her practice, the project is process driven, varying from digital still life, polaroids to film to the tactility of typewriting all cathartic and many deliciously error prone. Meanwhile has several key textual entrance points including; Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, ("What is the use of a book" thought Alice "without pictures and conversation") and Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.   The image making period ended in August 2021.

A photobook: Down, down, down and still the weeds prevail  will be the first work from this period.