‘Mum and Dad didn't know that they carried a fatal, ultra-rare genetic condition, and my younger brother and sister died when I was a child. After my parents died, I photographed the house I grew up in to tell this story and to explore my own sense of self’. Oliver Woods KICKSTARTER
We can spend our whole lives experiencing something but not have the space to pinpoint it or talk about it, and that can profoundly shape our life experience and sense of self. Oliver’s deeply personal work documents loss, grief, avoidance, and secrets within his parents' home, his childhood home, exploring memory and his sense of reality and history through objects, colour, light, X-rays, dust, traces, shadows, patterns, smell, and touch. I absolutely love how Oliver explores his past, moving through a space to make sense of it and go back to feel things again.
I co-curated a pop-up installation within a derelict house in Peckham, 2025 Domestic, Shrine of The Muses. We included an X-ray image from ‘Elegy’ in the curation of over 40 photographers, filmmakers, and sound artists, looking at life within the home. Shrine of the Muses
I have a shared interest in the traces of life held within objects. I’ve been documenting objects on the street for ten years with ‘Someone’s Rubbish’. Even though the objects I spot are not directly connected to me, I pick up on the energy around the object, the signs of use, the dirt, the scratches, rips, wear and tear, the signs of life and stories. What do those domestic objects tell us about ourselves? This is another reason why I am so drawn to Elegy. Oliver focuses sharply on the traces of life within his own experience. @cjuno_
Support Kickstarter ELEGY BY OLIVER WOODS
MY CHILDHOOD MITTEN AGED 5, THE OTHER WAS LOST IN 1975 KICKSTARTER
By the time I was five, in the mid 1970’s, I had lost first my younger brother and then my younger sister to an ultra-rare genetic condition called Pompe disease. I am the only surviving child. My clearest childhood memory is mum telling me about the death of my sister sat in her car. I still know the exact place.
How do you talk to a child about the loss of their sibling? How do you cope as a parent with losing your child? These events cast huge shadows for all of us. There was a hierarchy of grief in our house, with mum at the top, followed years later by dad. Yet I always felt both protected and overlooked in this conversation.
I went from being the eldest child to being an only child, an identity shift that always felt like a contradiction. Mum was an artist and painted individual posthumous portraits of both dead children. These always hung on the wall, along with my own, ever older portraits. But who were my siblings really, and who was I? My own feelings felt inaccessible.
Pompe disease is so rare that no one knew what it was at the time. In its infant form it was always fatal until about 2009, with the advent of gene editing and specialist drugs.
In its adult form there are only about 250 people in the UK who have it, less than 10,000 worldwide.
It required both of my parents to be unwitting Pompe carriers to begin this genetic lottery: somehow this condition has bounced down, sly and undetected, on both sides of my family tree, always masked by a good gene. Two inherited faulty genes from my parents produced a missing enzyme on chromosome 17, which meant that the body could not store glucose, which was fatal to both my siblings.
By the end of 2020 both of my parents had died, and I was suddenly faced with the task of clearing the house I grew up in. I wanted to do something expressive and creative and, fuelled by the loss of my parents, I felt I had to connect with my five-year-old self and give him a voice in this story. I photographed everything – the spaces, the rooms, the light, the dirt and the objects, some of which I had x-rayed. I bagged up the dust and had it analysed at Cambridge University. These were ways of expressing my long-hidden feelings.
This project has been cathartic and a meditation on love and loss, the past and present. In the end grief delayed has been better than grief denied. It has been a strange kind of inheritance.
SIBLING RATTLE BELL KICKSTARTER
GREEN GRAVE GRAVEL KICKSTARTER
HAIR IN BLUE OVAL CONTAINER KICKSTARTER
ATTIC CHILDHOOD SUITCASE KICKSTARTER
CHILDHOOD BEDROOM DOOR OPEN KICKSTARTER
LOFT MUM AND ME KICKSTARTER
X RAY mums objects jewellery box KICKSTARTER
X RAY CAROLINE PAINTING KICKSTARTER
CHILDHOOD BED KICKSTARTER
LOCK OF MUM'S HAIR IN BOX KICKSTARTER
Lidar through the wall in my parents KICKSTARTER
ELECTRON MOTH WING SCALE ON CABINET KICKSTARTER
ELECTRON COBWEB KICKSTARTER
CHILDHOOD BEDROOM REFLECTION IN WINDOW KICKSTARTER
AVENGER CAR MUM TOLD ME ABOUT CAROLINE'S DEATH HOVERING OUTSIDE KICKSTARTER
Photography Copyright Oliver Woods, for any further use contact Oliver. Feature by Chloe Juno