“Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.'“ (Gaston Bachelard, the poetics of space)

‘The Wives of Cayton’ is a work in progress which explores the ‘house’ as a scene of family dramas, constructing a notion of an unfamiliar domestic space as familiar and uncanny. The work is located at Cayton Hall in North Harrogate, the story of Cayton Hall stretches back over many centuries with a first mention in William the Conqueror’s Domesday book of 1085.

The work aims to explore the feelings of the space and the boundaries of memory, using a culmination of new photography alongside an exploration of the available texts, diaries and existing imagery from family albums, negatives and archives. ‘The Wives of Cayton’ explores the real and imagined stories of the women who lived there, Anne (Madame) Messenger, Elizabeth Simpson (Ward), Emmeline Horsfall (Gethin), Emmeline Hudleston (Simpson/Horsfall), Emily Bright (Gethin) and Mary Hudleston (Robinson).

The images below are some of the material shot whilst the house was unoccupied and prior to its sale, they are the sets of unknown dramas unfolding, waiting for the characters to walk on. The work aims to develop a visual language for representing these rather elusive memory spaces, places that in their realisation point to some traumatic event that may or may not be represented in the photograph.