- Venue
- Mission Gallery
- Starts
- Tuesday, January 13, 2015
- Ends
- Sunday, February 15, 2015
- Address
- Gloucester Place | Maritime Quarter | Swansea SA1 1TY | Wales | UK
- Location
- Wales
- Organiser
- Mission Gallery
Mette Vorraa is a Norwegian artist who aims to share stories and experiences through the visual language of photography. After studying cultural studies and photojournalism her practice focuses on the notion of identity and heritage. This accounts particularly for Norwegian and British culture, where the latter became stronger after moving to Wales in 2011, and also the likeness and difference between the two cultures.
The exhibited work is created from several meetings with two individuals that have inhabited two different living spaces over a period of time. These meetings and developing relationships was a result of intricate extended family relations which has, for Vorraa, come to represent how we change – in the sense of inhabiting new spaces and constantly transforming as cultural beings. The people portrayed are of English and Norwegian origin and they were commuting every so often between her house in Wales and his house in Norway in order to keep both of their own environment whilst sharing their lives together. What the viewer sees are scenes and objects that come to claim their places in different environments and also claim their places in different times. The significance is in the decorative and everyday objects that give the viewer clues in order to form a story of their own.
Vorraa works primarily with medium format film which gives the work a more formal approach because of the way of working but yet conveys the emotion in atmospheres when photographed. Working with film is a much more organic process to Vorraa rather than digital and has become important to incorporate in her personal work. In that sense her photography carries heritage to the actual medium itself as well as to the subject matter and people portrayed.
