It will be a portrait in absentia,
an outline drawn around an empty space,
and little by little a figure will emerge from the background,
pieced together from everything she was not
A portrait in absentia began in 2002 with the discovery of an old diary in Tayside Recycling Centre in Dundee. The diary had belonged to a Mrs Mary Milne, and contained her sporadic accounts of her life between 1975 and 1988.
The information contained in the diary was typical; from detailed accounts of everyday life and holidays, to the noting of the deaths of her loved ones over the years.
The discovery led to a series of works exploring ideas of loss and legacy, including: Epitaph, You & I and Think of the voices you are not hearing today.
The diary also contained a series of addresses. In 2006 I decided to write to each of these addresses, explaining how and where I had found the diary, and explaining the work that it had inspired. After many months of hearing nothing back I received a letter from Sydney. It was from a Linda Milne, who claimed to be the step-granddaughter of the diary's author.
This began a long correspondence between Linda and myself. She emigrated from Scotland to Australia when she was 11, leaving her grandparents in Dundee. She wrote to her gran from when she arrived until the latter's death a few years later. Her grandfather remarried soon after and Linda continued the correspondence with his new wife- Mary Milne. When her grandfather died in the late 1980s, Mary became Linda's only remaining contact in Scotland, the country she still referred to as 'home'.
Linda and Mary never met but they had a regular letter contact up until the late 1990s when Mary stopped replying to the letters. Linda, having no other family in Scotland, had to assume that Mary had passed away and her contact with 'home' was lost. That was until she received my letter in 2006.
Linda is also a spiritual medium, and believes that everything happens for a reason, everything is mapped out for us and that there are no coincidences. She therefore believes that my finding the diary and contacting her is all being controlled by a higher force.
In 2008 I travelled to Australia, with the diary, to meet Linda Milne. She lives on the outskirts of Sydney in a house that she and her partner are renovating. I worked alongside Sydney artist Kathryn Gray on documenting the meeting, and discussions around all aspects of the process. I left Sydney on December 1st and returned back to Scotland.
Once back in Scotland I travelled to Dundee on Linda's behalf to search the death records to discover what became of Mary. After an initial search of the time period when Linda lost touch revealed nothing, I traced back through Mary's husbands details to finally find her death certificate. The certificate revealed that Mary had in fact died only days before, on December 1st 2008- the same day I had flown out of Australia.
As well as other intimate details the certificate revealed, such and the exact time and cause of her death, Mary's certificate also contained her parents details. It reveled that her mother's surname prior to marriage was in fact the same as my own. These new revelations proved extremely interesting to Linda, who throughout the process has insisted that there must be some connection between families in spirit must be driving the project on.
In 2011 I returned to Sydney to pick up the work with Kathryn, and meet with Linda again to discuss this new information.
