How does it feel?

How Does It Feel? is an on going collaboration between Ames and their family. 

Over the past 2 years I have been developing a collaborative film with my family, inspired by our experiences of adoption and reconnection.

Put up for adoption as a baby, my Mum didn’t know her birth family until tracking them down and meeting them for the first time in 2016. With two new aunts and an uncle, as well as a whole new extended family, we have begun a journey together of learning about who our family really is, where we came from, and how we live/have lived - not all too far away from one another.

Temporarily separated again like most families in the pandemic, during one of the lockdowns I held workshops over zoom. Talking about our pasts, separately and together, uncovering memories, and continuing to fill in the gaps, through quizzes about childhood tales and favourite chocolate bars, taking each other on Google maps tours and dressing up in domestic drag. I’ve been sharing parts of my participatory and collaborative art process with them, and they have been sharing their own stories with each other in turn.

Together we will work towards the creation of a new film, examining nature vs nurture, play and re-performance as tools to collaborate and work across generations and walks of life. The film will borrow techniques from documentary filmmaking and combine footage that I have shot in interview style with workshop documentation and other experiments. Using humour, nonlinear or partial narratives, to show the multiple perspectives that make up a family, and the changing social mores that affect them.

Sharing a typically northern humoured, Irish descendant, intimate but not overly sentimental, working class Derby family’s journey into art practice. A relatable and engaging new work to think through what makes a family and what our histories and our families reflect back about ourselves, and our times.