Abstract nominee

"When I couldn’t stand the tension anymore, I would run to the fields and scream to the sky, run and lose myself in the space…"
As a very young child, my parents emigrated from the U.S. to Britain. As a family, we started out well but later my parents struggled in the changing landscape of their lives and were drawn slowly apart, creating unbearable fights and tension at home. My little sister and I became an island together in the increasing desolation of Mum and Dad’s marriage. We spent more and more time in the fields losing ourselves; escaping the fights, running wild and making dens where we would spend entire days playing together. These photos are a homage to open space and the countryside as the ultimate healing grounds of my youth.
I took these photos with an ND filter, panning from the passenger seat of our car. That blurred movement whilst capturing small fragments of the landscape in perfect detail helped me to portray that almost dizzy exhilaration and empowerment one feels whilst running through fields as a child. I also used a turquoise graduated filter to give the submerged, dreamscape feel that these photos have.

Born in New York, Dorrie McVeigh’s family emigrated to the UK in the late 70's. The impact of that move has been pivotal to her work as she looks into how our past can influence our sense of identity and belonging. Mcveigh has traveled extensively in her life, perhaps always searching for her own allegorical "homeland" and eventually in a perhaps hereditary act, unrooted her own children to make a new life in Marseille. In a recent exhibition, Mcveigh writes on this experience: “In our homeland, we are essentially held together by the fabric of friendships that have been forged by time and the common thread that these friendships and our extended family embody. When we leave this we are set afloat, there is huge freedom but at the same time we are unrooted and there is an inevitable loss in this act. For my own part, it was in the wide-open landscapes of my childhood, that I felt most whole” McVeigh uses her photography as a means to forage into the hidden regions of the “self” as she is drawn to and grapples with very personal themes such as identity and nostalgia.