Boglarka Eliz Varga
East London Printmakers Graduate Marketing Award 2020
Carousel offset lithograph 10,5*14,8cm
My work for the past two years has been examining the relationship of the mother and daughter dyad as the child develops from birth to the first years of life. The duality and the sense of separation, transformation and loss are explored experimentally through image making.
While elaborating in the subject of motherhood and its complexity, mainly focusing on privacy, separation and belonging my primary artistic tool is the camera. These vernacular photographs are the point of departure for my artworks in various printmaking techniques.
Carousel, is focusing on the theme of journey and belonging through capturing the micro word of my family routed in Eastern-Europe and raising our child in London. The photographic collages postcard size suggests materiality and the tactile embodiment of a digital file, moreover points towards the longing to communicate during lockdown when physical contact with family members abroad is not possible.
The Video Installation in a Domestic Place 1, is an accumulation of my memories in the form of personal family slides and vintage projectors, a looping slide containing the collaged photographs from the series Carousel, a domestic interior filled with toys, plants and an undone bed. These fragments are performative: moving, overlapping, intersecting – the work is playful – like a swing between present and past.
Fragments from the Video Installation in a Domestic Place 1
I started Days in the Distance a photographic diary on Instagram, at the onset of self-isolation on the 20th of March, with my 4-year-old daughter and husband in Watford, UK.
The title suggests not only the social distancing, but the altered perception of time and space between bodies, places and moments during our seclusion. The lockdown placed our daily lives under a magnifying glass, which amplified the distance between loved ones but also the feelings of love, care and longing.
The domestic scenes, daily routines and playful shadows captured our ongoing existence between the four walls of our rented house, amounts to a digital time capsule. Days in the Distance is a re-imagined family album, accommodating everyday snapshots alongside moments of celebration and loss.
The daily inventories of family fragments: photographs, diary pages, children drawings and overlooked everyday routines are in the heart of my practise. They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through image capture.
Polaroid Photographs on expired film 9*11 cm/each and diary page on recycled envelope
https://www.instagram.com/elizboglarkavarga/