Caroline and Mim also share a lifelong passion for photography. Their nostalgic fantasies about Japanese culture were explored through their separate travels to Japan and separate photographic practices.
Mim Stirling’s work is informed by structuralist cinematic conventions; her images take the coded language of cinema, and fracture it in stills. In her series, “Shot Reverse Shot”, she recombines small portions of different films, and introduces characters to create a conversation, a false narrative between two worlds. Sourced from Japanese Samurai genre films and their Western remakes, the images question ideas of originality and the apparent cryptomnesia – the phenomenon of the reappearance of a long-forgotten memory as if it were a new experience – of contemporary cinema.
The images, originally on film, then digitised to DVD, are transmitted through an analogue TV, and then finally captured digitally. This generation-loss echoes the loss of the grand world of the cinema, now reduced and imprisoned inside televisions.
Caroline McLean-Foldes’ work is informed by metaphysics and imaginal psychology. In her series “Wonderland – Through the Looking Glass” she uses Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor for her visit to Japan, and her images explore a Japanese wonderland. For her, Japan is a sacred realm of magical landscapes and spirits.
Caroline says: “My digital camera allowed me to explore parallel, elusive worlds in a way that I found less available within the constraints of analogue film. I had unlimited freedom to capture the mysterious, metaphysical and intangible … I sought ancient traces and modern insights … Darkness and light in a smoky patchwork, revealed to me omnipresent unconventional dream-worlds.”
Caroline and Mim are both founding members of The Photo Group, a photographic artists’ collective.
