Sarah Snodgrass

Intimate Separation

Intimate Separation is an exploration into what it feels like not to belong to one specific place, but rather between two. I attempt to question the notion of what ‘home’ is and if any one location can truly satisfy this natural desire. Moving from America to the outskirts of London by myself at a young age of 18 years, has forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the only place I had come to know as home.

Throughout this project, I am exploring ideas of longing, loss, dislocation, and distance. I am looking at space’s representative of nostalgia and memory in Texas, the place I was born and brought up in. My feelings of confusion, grief, and frustration towards this now seemingly foreign place; aligned with an accompanying and unsettling, impending migration back. I dislocate myself within the image to show feelings of uncertainty and provoking a lack of knowledge in where I am. The images reflect my sense of being in a liminal state – anywhere, somewhere, or nowhere simultaneously.

I use the surveillance technology of Google Street View and photographs taken on a mobile phone to address the accessibility and limitations of the technology that has been placed at our fingertips. I manipulate the images of myself by repeating a violent process of destroying the photographs original information until little is left, showing the constraint of what we see and how a photograph is plainly not the same as physically being there. This series of images attempts to work both with and against ‘(re)presentation’ of the self and all that lies in between.