Breaking Down The Barriers

The body of work with the theme of Domestic Violence and Abuse is a continuation of the previous project.

In continuation of a previous project, ‘Out of the darkness into the light’, after much deliberation, I felt ‘Breaking down the barriers’ would work well with the first project.  

Initially, I was hoping to put the whole spectrum of the experience of domestic violence and abuse into this project; however, I found that breaking it up into three elements would work better and help my mental health in the long run. To do this, I had to go back to previous memories of what it was like for myself when I finally broke the cycle of abuse after thirty-plus years. Over the past ten months, I have not just been doing research into this, but I have also done soul searching to understand how  I got through this terrible ordeal. Looking back, it seemed as if what I experienced was a day to day occurrence and a normal situation.  When you live it, it is what you deem as ‘the norm’; the fact of the matter is actually, it is not what most people would classify as normal. In daily life, you would have a happy personal life with disagreements, possibly a family including children and a work life in which you try and balance everything in between.

When you are in domestic violence and abuse, you work in ‘fight or flight mode’, hoping one day you will wake up from a nightmare and everything will be great. Unfortunately, this can be in between putting on a pretence that everything is wonderful.  

Unfortunately, that is not the case; it can go on for years or until you have no strength to carry on. After decades of violence and abuse and trying on numerous occasions to escape to different locations and break the cycle, something happened that made me realise something had to change dramatically.  I had to cut ties with everyone I knew, along with how I thought and lived my life on a daily basis.  Despite the separation I had from family members and friends due to the situation, I found solace in my hobbies; one of those was photography. This helped me to keep focused rather than the wider outside world, noticing how much pain I was in and how close I was to considering ending my life at that time. 

There are a lot of victims who never get to the point I did and live a life in fear; this can include their children. They remain too scared to approach anyone in case their family is separated and they have nowhere to go. This is why this project is such an important part of what I now recognise to be a second series in this body of work based on domestic abuse and violence.  

Triggers and flashbacks are never spoken about or catalogued visually. Yet, behind the writing of the dissertation and the artefact, which includes well-known photographers and artists, there is also a journey of someone who has experienced this first hand as part of their journey.  You could be living next to this person.  So when you hear a door bang, a knock at the door, a piece of music, or a police car with sirens on as examples, think about the victims of domestic violence and abuse who crumble at the very thought of it.