Projects 18: Thin Blood / Thick Water

Flannery O’Kafka is a photographic artist living in Glasgow. Her work centres around themes of motherhood, religion, belonging, comedy and suffering, with a focus on the family album.

Thin Blood / Thick Water brings together a range of recent work that combines O’Kafka’s interest in museum exhibits, amateur curators and outsider collectors – stemming from her recent residency at Dubois County Museum in Indiana, USA – with personal images of her birth family, adoptive family and her own five children:

“Working within the medium of amateur museums, snapshot photography, and liturgical call and response, I’m constructing a fractured family album that hangs somewhere between an emotional document and a fiction. In the tradition of Roland Barthes’ ‘Mourning Diary’, it’s a very public grief. A story of crippled minds and bodies, growing up playing house, and pregnant teenagers sent to convents by the cover of night. It’s a clumsy stab at bridging the disconnect between my possible (from birth) futures (including ones where my children are not in existence), my parallel histories, and the shadowy hinterland of suffering that lies between (and intersects) both of these.”

O’Kafka is a recent graduate of Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art. Over the last two years, her work has been included in exhibitions at venues such as: Glasgow Women’s Library; The Pipe Factory, Glasgow; Art Park, House for an Art Lover, Glasgow; and 12 Star Gallery, London. In January 2018, O’Kafka was Artist in Residence at Dubois County Museum, Indiana, USA, the town where she also presented the solo exhibition: You Would Be Home Now If You lived Here.