The Wives of Cayton

The location for my current project is 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.  

Through my research I have become increasingly interested in the stories of some of the women who occupied the home,  Elizabeth Huddleston (Ward) from approx 1833-1842,  Emmeline Horsfall (Gethin) from approx 1875-1910,  Emily Bright (Gethin) from approx 1910-1944.

The project is situated within ‘memory spaces’ and ‘remembering’, alongside documentation as preservation.  These themes are consistent with my previous work yet with the introduction of an ‘unfamiliar’ domestic space.  I am interested in how family histories and stories are at one with the spaces represented and the family romances therein.  I aim to explore the ‘house’ as the scene of family dramas, constructing a notion of this domestic space as unfamiliar and uncanny; that is the terrain.  It is ‘unfamiliar’ inasmuch as it lacks the full range of understanding of the stories of the wives who lived there.  It is fractured in so many ways; it is also about illustrating ‘forgetting’ and ‘false memories’.  This is more ambiguous territory, removed from my own personal and immediate memories.

My aim is 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 and existing imagery from albums, negatives and archives.   I have been active in photographing the space by way of collecting source material and exploring the way in which the rooms and surroundings translate visually.  

The woman’s role in the ‘family album’ has always been of interest to me, where women were seen as the keepers of family memories.  However the approach and proposed final outcome is still in the developmental stages, but what is certain are the use of the diaries and found sources to uncover these family romances and dramas.

The collections below are the photographic starting points for each of the three wives, they function as the 'set' from which I will further my research and explore the narratives in order to present a visual and textual resolution to the project.

 

Elizabeth

Emmeline

Emily