This series called ‘Mos’ which I started creating on a daily basis on March 1st 2024. They were inspired by a visit to my parent’s house, near Salisbury UK, which had been flooded under a foot of water in late January 2024.
When my sister, Sophie & I visited a few days after, they’d already cleared up the worst, the mud etc. with the help of kind neighbours.
However, they hadn’t yet dare open the bottom drawer of an old desk where all the older family photos albums were, probably out of dread.
So the day we arrived, we opened the water logged drawer and obsessively spent two days gently peeling old snaps from their respective soaked albums and laying them out to dry on a rug.
The damage, which I was secretly marvelling at, was done – most photographs had buckled, or random mottled stains. Hand-written notes on the reverse of some photos had been super-imposed onto others and so on. To my surprise, we browsed through the soggy snaps sharing recollections, stories and jokes but not mourning the damage.
I suppose only a sliver of memories reside in snaps, photos are, after all, simply little cues to the bigger picture in our minds, even if they are warped, blurred and torn.
Some warn that diving into boxes of old photos can be like nostalgic quicksand but I’ve never seen it that way. The past is the past, the present the present – one resonates the other is.
Sure, there are moments, especially looking at the generations of relations before us as their younger selves, when you realise you never knew or will know them at that point in their lives – as kids or young adults. This can make you think.
But as a rule, I love studying moments of the past and how this sliver of a record resonates as an image just as much as another artist might enjoy studying landscapes etc. or a geologist their rocks.

These polaroid scale format paintings/drawings called ‘Mos’, each titled by the exact time of execution are a daily routine, come rain or shine.

Images:
01 – Me early 70s.
02 – 07/03/2024 16:22 // 21cm x 29.7cm, phthalo blue ink, crayon & stand oil on Japanese Ito Bindery paper
03 – Post flood sitting room floor
04 – Random collection from dad’s family album, 50s
05 – Our dad Tim, mid 60s
06 – Dad, Sophie and me, early 70s
07 – Brothers Jack and Basil Bonallack (Grandpa) 1920?
08 – Post flood sitting room floor
09 – Post flood sitting room floor