Morwenna Kearsley: On ethics as comfort
In this episode we talk with Morwenna Kearsley about ethics as comfort. She describes both her personal projects and her projects working with participants, focusing on ownership and control over the images that are produced. She discusses her choice to focus on making portraits of objects instead of making portraits of people, and she shares the ethical responsibilities she feels as a photographer in the age of the internet.
What does photography ethics mean to Morwenna?
“Well I think it is an ongoing conversation that you have with yourself and your practice, whatever form that practice takes. So for me it’s a conversation between myself, the materials that I use, the technologies that I use, and how that relates to the people that I’m working with and the places that I’m working within. It’s not something fixed … as the technologies of photography change and the applications of photography change, photography ethics must and does change with it. … For me, it’s just trying to be as aware as possible about what you’re doing, and, for me, to not make work that I’m uncomfortable making, not to put anybody else in a situation that I would not be comfortable in…“ (39:47)
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Morwenna Kearsley is a Scottish artist working predominantly with photography, text and moving image. She often photographs objects that have the potential to reveal part of who we are, as individuals and communities, from museum artefacts and personal effects to discarded scraps, draped fabrics and textiles. She also collaborates with other people via workshops, evening classes and community arts projects. Through her practice, she is actively engaged in conversations about the photograph's role as a document, as a vehicle for artistic expression and as a tool of cross-community collaboration. She studied for a BA(Hons) in Photography, Film & Imaging at Napier University (Edinburgh), graduating in 2007. With the support of a Leverhulme Scholarship for Fine Art, she received an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art in 2015.
You can see her work at http://www.morwennakearsley.co.uk