From issue: #20 The Graduate Issue 2023
Named after an extract from TS Eliot’s poem East Coker, Lyssa Harakis-Parish’s series When Here and Now Cease to Matter explores the artist’s own home. As a child Harakis-Parish didn’t have a private space moved house multiple times, meaning these images document both their relationship with the idea of home, and the physical act of building one for the first time. Shot on both 120mm film and Polaroids, the images feature the recurring motif of sunlight, which symbolises the significance of this new-found personal space to the artist. Brought up in South Devon, Harakis-Parish works mainly with analogue film processes, poetry, and found archival material “through the lens of my experience growing up in poverty and as part of the Cypriot diaspora”. They identify as queer, and explore notions of heritage, belonging, and history through theoretical ideologies of the “Other”, rooted in concepts of home.
In 2023, Lyssa Harakis-Parish graduated from the BA Photography degree at London College of Communications, University of the Arts London. Harakis-Parish is also a member of the Queer Youth Art Collective, and has exhibited their photography at Copeland Gallery and Staffordshire Studios in London, and taken part in poetry readings with Amersham Poets Society and Write Bloody Publishing. Currently, they are writing a poetry collection recollecting all the beds they’ve ever slept in.
Find out more about Lyssa Harakis-Parish here.
