My birth family exhibits the symptoms of a form of emotional echolalia. Echolalia is an involuntary reflex that involves the repetition or echoing of an utterance from another person (1). It is generally associated with autistic savants (historically called idiot savants) or with people diagnosed with neurological disorders like Tourettes syndrome, or with certain brain injuries or impairments. Sometimes, the repetition is only a phrase, or a few words, but autistic savants can often repeat whole tracts of conversation or dialogues from a film or play. My recent research interests have comprised of an exploration of echolalia and the family narrative. While echolalia is a term I have extracted from the medical discourse, my research has involved looking at the way in which this term can also be applied to the impulse most people have to repeat family stories. I am therefore concerned with echolalia, not in terms of its pathology, but as a metaphor for the pattern and repetition that exists in the telling of the family narrative.

In this work I have sought to capture the emotive echolalic moment. I have attempted to simulate a record of the reflexive experience to repeat a story. I was intrigued with the idea of what the experience of an echo might look like if you were able to capture it and freeze it just at the crest point of remembrance. What does it look like to be immersed in this way? To this end I have physically immersed and frozen my photographs as an explorative tool and starting point for this segment of my investigation.

Fugue (Dear Darkness) consists of a grid of 50 photographs each A3 size (42 x 29cm). The photographs are portraits that have initially been altered through digital layering with images of landscapes and organic material, producing second generation images that have been immersed in water and physically frozen inside a block of ice. Simulating the echo, I re-photographed the portraits inside their block of ice using movement and blur. As a result the images appear marked, stained and blurred. Presented in the grid, many of the portraits appear to be repetitions, evoking the ripple of echo, yet they are all slightly different, symbolic of perception and hindsight. The subjects also shift and change, becoming a chorus, yet each is caught within their own experience of the echolalic moment.

Full faced with watchful eyes the subjects engage with the observer through a veil of remembering. My use of layering and the effects created by the ice are signs for the viewer that may indicate that this is an intimate moment, yet at the same time one that we all experience. Their gaze may at first appear outward, but is more inward as the subjects are swept internally to another time and space in the past. Immersed in the act of remembering, there is a conflict between presence and absence in these images. What narrative is being replayed? These moments are very private so we don’t know. We can only imagine and using our own lived body experience and the clues given produce an individual response.

The title, Fugue (Dear Darkness) provides an entry point for discerning the meaning of this work. A fugue can be a immersive, dreamlike state of altered reality. It can also be defined as a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts (2). This is an allegory for the immersive experience of being caught in the echolalic moment.

(1) Gary J Heffner, "Echolalia and Autism," (2000). http://sites.google.com/site/autismhome/Home/special-situations/echolalia. Accessed July 1, 2009

(2) Merriam-Webster, "Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary." http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fugue. Accessed June 22, 2009