My wall in progress 
Tape images example 
Images in progress, playing with future and present 
Greyscale image with green thread 
A collection of the elephant at university 
A collection of the elephant in my room
Above are a few snapshots of my studio wall. It took quite a while for me to actually get to this point of photographing my childhood toy elephant rather than what I had started with focusing on (bottlecaps, nature and the underside of trucks). I find it interesting because this theme I had decided to focus on was never something that had been in my mind. It came out of the blue when I was taking snapshots of my room and interesting things that were ‘lived’ or gave proof of me living there. I saw the ragged looking elephant lying on my bed and knew it made for an interesting subject with all of its tattered edges. I experimented with ways of capturing it and after some talk with my lecturer, I began to experiment with ways I ‘care’ for the toy. As well as adding a rather literal/humorous approach to how I did this, I decided to begin printing out large scale sizes of the photos to then see what would happen next. I ended up choosing to physically manipulate my A0 sizes images by responding in the same way I’d care for the elephant. In some photos I stitched them together with green thread. I also experimented with the idea that you cannot have repair without injury and also I experimented with different ways of injuring and repairing a image. As you can see in one photo, I started putting tape on the photos to see if I could ‘age’ the image. It ended up ripping the image quite a bit but I realized that the image was still on the tape. I realized that that was a good way to injure and then repair an image by placing the tape back together again, if a little disjointed.
The image above is a part of the series I took of my older sister holding my toy elephant that she made for me when I was around eleven years old. I decided to take this because I was thinking about the phrase “context changes an image”. If people just saw this image, they wouldn’t think much about the hands holding it. But if they had the information that she was the creator of it, then they would look at it with a different perspective. With this particular image, I got everyone in my class to hug it. I wanted to experiment with yet more ways of caring and I thought that the essence of care (wrinkling the paper when it’s hugged) would be a good representative of that and it differentiated from the other pictures on my wall.