William Yang
William Yang | Australia b.1943 | 'About my mother' (portfolio) 2003 | 30 gelatin silver photographs; ed. 2/10 | Purchased 2004. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist
The Hand, the Eye & the Heart | 1 October 2011 — 12 February 2012 | GOMA | Free admission
For About my mother, William Yang assembled a suite of photographs of his mother, Emma. Some are drawn from his own photographs and others have been re-photographed from images he found and collected from family albums. The work has a special poignancy; Yang began the portfolio following his mother’s death and it charts her life from young woman and mother to grandmother and elderly woman, ending just before she suffered a stroke. Each photograph is accompanied by a written passage similar to the monologues used in Yang’s performance pieces, revealing the loving but difficult relationship he had with his mother and his struggle to define his own sexuality.
Sorting through and poring over photographs is part of the grieving process; in doing so we grieve not only for the person we knew but also for the person we couldn’t possibly have known. Yang gives us a sense of Emma as a strong and proud woman, and we experience his struggle to find, in a photograph, her true essence.
