“Magic” Memories (2023 - 25)

“Magic” Memories is an interplay of family, labour, and self representation drawn from my family archive. Centring working class women’s lives, the work captures moments where the boundaries between private and public spheres blur, where the personal becomes inseparable from waged labour.

Using photographs from my own archive, images predominantly of women, including my mother, grandmother, and myself showing scenes of bar work and waitressing, both forms of servitude labour. These images, often taken as cheerful mementoes, unfold into a deeper narrative: one that reveals the ongoing realities of intergenerational labour of working class women’s lives. Far from being moments of leisure these family snaps quietly depict cycles of continuous labour and a facade of happiness maintained for respectability politics. The photographs show a blend of bright smiles and hidden exhaustion, speaking to the dual burden that these women carry, expected to perform contentment while enduring productive and reproductive labour.

Aiming to challenge the traditional notion of the family album as a repository of private or leisurely moments. Instead, reframing my archive to foreground how work and family life are deeply intertwined. Here, snapshots of labour become markers of familial bonds, shared experience, and collective endurance.

These themes continue across the wider work, including Three Generations of Women’s Work, CV (2022), a list of paid and unpaid labour histories beginning with her grandmother’s birth in 1930; Shape Shift, Work Shift (2024), which in this iteration exists as a spoken word piece by the artist; and Lucky (2025), created in collaboration with artist Devon Osborne.

Also featured is Seanchaithe Diaspora (2025), a quiet homage to the Irish immigrant men I grew up around in Derby. These figures are often present in her thinking but rarely visualised. Within my family and wider community, these men were frequently found on the other side of the bar, participating in diasporic rituals of oral storytelling, singing, drinking, gambling, and often taking photographs like the ones included in this work.

“Magic” Memories is not a romantic celebration of labour or working class hard graft. Instead, it offers a critical lens that sheds light on women’s unrecognised contributions and the daily performances of respectability they are expected to maintain. The work invites viewers to reconsider the labour narratives embedded in their own family photographic albums and the broader implications of class, gender, and labour in shaping how we understand our own histories.