Winners – Series
In their own innovative ways, winning series from Maria Lax and Diane Meyer look at the lingering traces of national history in personal consciousness.
Lax’s Some Kind of Heavenly Fire was born when she uncovered her grandfather’s chronicling of a series of UFO sightings in her native Finnish neighbourhood in the 1960s — a time of great socio-economic strife for Northern Finland. “It wasn’t until I read my grandfather’s book that I learned of the incredible stories of supernatural events, bravery and struggle against hardship in what is largely a barren land,” she remarks. The resulting project – a delicate and dynamic amalgamation of photography, family archive and newspaper cuttings – explores how the supernatural anomalies became a conduit for the anxieties of the era.
Meanwhile, Meyer’s delicate artworks in Berlin combine photography and cross-stitching to trace the physical and psychic legacy of the Berlin Wall. The embroidery is made to resemble pixels, and, in some of the images, mirrors the scale and location of the former wall. “I am interested in the porous nature of memory as well as the means by which photography transforms history into nostalgic objects that obscure objective understandings of the past,” says Meyer. “By visually referencing pixels, a connection is being made between forgetting and file corruption.”