I've been using the above photo in the Community Memoir/Public Art project as an example of suitable working material. It shows my brother and me in about 1968 or 1969, taking a bath in the only available place in the somewhat primitive miners' home where we lived with our Mum and our Grandparents. The way it would be used in the current project is to write a series of short, one sentence phrases suggested by it, sort of like memory-captions. Patty and I would then select the one that worked best with the photo, and in relation to the photos and texts of the other participants (that is, we don't want all the memories to be the same). But in the last few years I've used fragments from the same photo again and again, at different sizes and resolutions, in prints on paper and artists' books, as I have done with lots of other photos: And in thinking about this process, I thought again of a life-size sculpture I made four years ago based on my memory of bathing in t...
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more