Finding Thomas Bartlett is a publication that blends fiction and historical fact to create a constructed narrative and life story for Thomas Bartlett, a 19th-century Scottish railway engineer who immigrated to Egypt and settled there, and who is the artist’s direct ancestor. It draws on recent practice involving family archives and documentary photography, complemented by the use of text and historical documents. The work examines themes of identity and migration, which are highly relevant to the current social and political climate. It seeks to address the question of whether national identity is fixed and inherited or constructed on an individual level.
Submerged City
‘Submerged City’, a project produced during the British Council’s Venice Fellowship program, raises awareness of rising sea levels and their threat to coastal communities around the world, including Venice and the Egyptian Nile Delta. It consists of a series of Polaroid photographs taken of landmarks around the island. These images were then submerged for up to two months in containers filled with water collected from the Nile Delta and the Egyptian Mediterranean, dried, scanned and enlarged. The length of time each Polaroid was kept submerged corresponds to the elevation of the depicted landmark and, by extension, its vulnerability to rising waters. Liberated from the instant and precise nature of conventional photography, the ’decayed’ results of this aleatory process invite us to contemplate the impermanence of the human-built environment and our own relationship with nature.
