Tink Lockett
Calm Nostalgia
The loose photograph that spills to the floor can be all it takes for a bomb to go off
Clare Gemima
Tink Lockett’s photographs have arrived at a moment when I find myself spending hours deciphering the belongings left to me by my mother, who passed away suddenly almost fifteen years ago. Amidst fur coats, pounamu, posters of James Dean, and an awkwardly large collection of golden frog-shaped ashtrays (confusing as she never smoked), the most consistent objects to appear throughout my culling attempts are:
a) stranded single 6 x 4s’ and
b) family photo albums—dreaded, plastic sheeted, beastly sized folders documenting every banality since day dot.
These overwhelming time-capsules, deliriously invasive, triggering, and joyful all at once, are portals I approach with utmost caution. I kept my distance deliberately, not only because of the surge of conflicting and combustive sensations that come with flicking through decades past, but largely because they trace the life my mother spent tracing mine. For half of the time since her death I have lived overseas, a decision that has offered life-jacket support within the ocean that is grief, yet one I acknowledge potentially extends its vastness. Reuniting with these photographs continues to provoke unexpected, often unwelcome emotions, and seems to intermittently accrue a much larger meaning shaped as much by her absence as my own. Playground moments, graduations, birthday parties, holidays spent at wealthy friend’s baches, before and after braces, terrible mid-puberty school portraits…at least there are bouts of comic relief in the process.
With continued perusal of Kodak detritus, further distinctions emerge. Some images are clearly made to construct memories in advance—you can almost picture the instigating photographer corralling attention, directing bodies into poses they would never otherwise assume, in deliberate and cheesy attempts to stabilise a moment designed to eventually be returned to. Others are candid, taken without consent. Guaranteeing pangs of hindsight cringe upon review, they capture unguarded moments with an almost innocent clarity: the child on the monkey bars, the undergraduate scraping through her degree, the teenager moving through the hellish gates of womanhood, and every other previous version of the person who now holds the photograph in her hands.
By no means are these types of images neutral.
While their inner details remain specific to the families they belong to, their structure is widely shared and immediately legible. Most of us inherit some version of the family album, whether carefully assembled or loosely accumulated—a collection that both anchors and unsettles our sense of self, and of those who made us. There are also photographs we keep close, even sleep beside for years, and ones strewn amongst others we would rather bury altogether that can’t be returned to without the need to pour a (very) strong drink. These attachments are not incidental. They point to a photograph’s capacity to hold conflict as much as memory, two conditions boldly remixed across Tink Lockett’s collages.
Approaching the familial archive not as something to be preserved intact, but as a site to be excavated, Lockett treats it as a provisional structure open to new interpretation. By interlacing fashion figures into personally inherited photographs, she produces a schism between her family and the unfamiliar —sometimes with blatant colour grading distinctions— and forces them to coexist. Lockett works with 35mm transparency slides, travelogue pictures taken by her great-grandparents in the UK and Europe, and of places in Gisborne where she grew up, often featuring her great-grandmother and great-aunt. Superimposed models, styled and photographed by Lockett, fracture the frame. The heightened saturation of the digitally inserted figures stands out against the filmic grain and imperfections of the archival images. The process remains intuitive; as she notes, “I can’t make two images fit—they choose each other.”
New tensions are set to never resolve. A woman in a peach dress arcs backward through a once-upon-a-time London square, her body suspended mid-pose amidst pigeons and commuters. Out of sync with her surroundings, she nonetheless commands the scene’s attention, as if staging one of the best days of her life before an unsuspecting audience. Elsewhere, a blonde figure in a sharply cut coat occupies the edge of a narrow brick enclosure, an obvious interloper. In the background, children cluster excitedly around a dark pony at a trough, their woollen sweaters in softened tones holding collectively, while the unfamiliar figure remains oddly sealed off and distant, like a thread that refuses to bind. In another image, a figure sits awkwardly at the centre of a rotating playground ride, with a slacked posture, cigarette in hand. Placed abruptly against the motion of children circling them, they appear almost appliquéd atop of the composition, loosely fixed within a structure that threatens to spin them out.
Lockett’s collages revive relationships that have come to an end, recasting images that have outlived those who created them. In her reconfigurations, eyelines cast across decades as well-dressed strangers slip into place, and textures like couture chiffons and silks press against her vintage family photographs without ever fully integrating. As her collages unwind the chaotic bounds of the conventional family photo album, they allow incompatible yet strangely harmonious temporalities to collide. With her striking insertions and reconfigurations, Lockett transforms the archive into something playful and peculiarly accessible. These inherited fragments do not produce an instinctual urge to turn, run, or fly away. What forms instead, is a fragile agreement–one that holds only if it is not examined too closely.