Hayleigh Longman is a photographic artist who uses her practice to open up dialogues and collect stories tied to people and place. Working with portraiture, performance and play, her work explores the duality of human strength and fragility.
Something Lost, Something Familiar is the first volume of an ongoing project, in which Hayleigh Longman traces the edges of her relationship with her mother. The ebbs and flows of their relationship are connected with the tree in the back garden, which Longman’s mother routinely cuts back to stop it from blocking the sunlight. Longman relates this intervention with nature to a feeling of only being able to get so far with her mother, before getting lost again. With the garden as their stage, mother and daughter are enmeshed in acts of mirroring and concealment, working through the maintenance of roots and growing distance that pulls together, and apart, their bond.
Interview by Phoebe Somerfield
PS: This piece of work is the first volume for 'Something Lost, Something Familiar'. Looking to the future, do you have thoughts about the next stage of the work following the relationship with your mother?
HL: Through the process of making this work, it’s come to my attention that for me this project is always on-going, I struggle to vision its end as it’s centred around the existing relationship I have with my mum. Despite us both knowing one another well, I view relationship’s as transient connections, forever developing.
When I try to sequence the work together it looks different because our relationship has changed since the last time I was making work with her. I started making the work two years ago so I feel like each year is a different stage, with the ends and beginnings sometimes blurring together. The first volume is where I felt I had enough work to edit something together and since that point. I am in the process of editing the next stage and thinking of ways to involve my mum in ways I haven’t done before, using small exchanges of asking her to take the pictures so the conversation about the work is shifting.
PS: I love the tree in your back garden as a metaphor for the relationship you have with your mother, the cutting back to keep the sunlight from being blocked. How did you come to feel as if the tree symbolised the relationship you had with her?
HL: After finishing my degree, I moved back in with my mum which is where the tree and our relationship became my focus. Coming home and facing some personal hurdles with the shift in my family life after my parents separating made me view my individual relationships with my parents differently. My mum had moved as a result of this and in her new back garden was this huge tree, which the whole estate is built around. We are the only people who have a tree in our back garden and it bothers my mum a lot as it grows so big and blocks all the light.
Every year or two my mother invests in getting the tree cut-back to allow sunlight into our space, it’s quite a big job and I relate this intervention with nature to a feeling of only being able to get so far with my mother, before getting lost again. The tree is forever growing but then gets chopped back again.
With the garden as our stage, the majority of the work is made within the presence of the tree. It creates strong casts of shadows which flood the garden that are recognisable in a lot of the portraits. Acts of mirroring and concealment, working through the maintenance of roots and growing. Distance that pulls together, and apart.
PS: Has the relationship with your mother changed during the lockdown periods?
HL: I believe it has, yes. I moved back in with her during lockdown last year so that again shifted our relationship and made me begin to make new work with her. This time around we were blessed with time, so it’s been interesting to see how that has reflected in my work. I feel some of the newer work has been more of a collaboration with her which has been interesting to see. Also making images indoors with her for the first time, seeing how that feels without the garden as the main focus but I am unsure of where that’s going. It can often feel as if we’re on top of one another as we’ve never really spent this much time together so it’s been interesting to see how we have adapted to coexisting to one another.
PS: Much of your work exists around thinking about your relationships and connections, is photography a way of processing and moving through these relationships or would you say it's more about documentation?
HL: It’s most definitely a way of processing and moving through the relationship. The ebbs and flows of the connection between a mother and a daughter I think is interesting. It will continue to develop as we both go through different changes in our independent lives and together in our relationship.