The Quiet Place is an autobiographical series which explores the absence of my father and grandfather through revisiting physical spaces of embodied memory. The photographs give a physical form to memory and consider how heritage and identity are informed through the temporality of place. The work is durational and is an attempt to piece together a broken and incomplete narrative to represent my own challenge at trying to understand my patrilineality.
The work is based in specific locations around Sheffield, Rotherham, Blackburn and London relating to my father and grandfather. My father left very suddenly in the middle of the night when I was nine and I never saw him again, and my grandfather became a surrogate father until he passed away when I was in my teens. I had this overwhelming need to return to places which I had shared with them as a child.
I used the same two cameras that I had used when I was seventeen, a 35mm Vivitar and a Mamiya 645, as I wanted to look through the same viewfinder and take these objects back to the spaces where I had learnt to use them. The final image 'The Sportsman Inn' is where my great grandmother lived, and is a pub that has since shut down. I spent a great deal of my childhood there and apparently my dad used to drink in there regularly, so it's a location that we never visited together but that was significant to both of us.
Hana O' Hara's artistic practise explores temporality and place, considering how place operates as a site of experience and memory. She considers how personal narratives and stories reside in the landscape, and the way in which places and objects retain memories and evoke nostalgia. Working with analogue photography and moving image, her work often incorporates and repurposes archived photographs and materials. She graduated with a degree in Photography, Film and Imaging from Edinburgh Napier University and is currently studying an MA in Photography at The University of Brighton. She currently divides her time between personal projects, commissions, mentoring and working with community groups and art organisations in Sussex as a photographer and artist facilitator.