Christopher Reid

b. 1964, Ireland/England

During the past twelve months I have made numerous visits to a convent with a Magdalene laundry that had closed some years previously. I was interested in the selling and abandonment of this place by the Catholic Church, and how it will be changed permanently in response to contemporary culture. I was also interested in preserving something of the physical reality of this place before it is gentrified.

I worked with film photography because I considered the silence of the image to be appropriate to the silence of the place. I wanted my photographs to describe a typology of the living spaces of the nuns and the long-term residents who once worked in the laundry. I found the attic to be of special interest. Here I found statues, crucifixes and many other objects that bring to mind lives lived here. These objects, and the building itself, seem to represent repressed memories of our shared and abandoned past. Some of the images and symbols evoked vivid memories of my childhood and early education. I attended religious schools growing up in Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s. The images offered me a re-reading of the institution that once had such a formative influence on Irish society.

(Text: a sense of place catalogue, 2007)