MEMORY, IMAGINATION, COLOUR

Based on photographs taken by the artist’s grandfather, this new body of work is drawn from an extensive personal archive spanning the 1940s to the present day. Rather than reproducing the original images faithfully, Hallimond inhabits them - imagining themselves in the time and space his grandad once occupied. Colours are entirely invented, shaping the emotional register and atmosphere of each scene. Through this process, the paintings hold a strong sense of the artist’s own presence, bridging the the space between memory, imagination and lived experience.

The seed for these paintings was planted when I sat down with my 98-year-old grandad in the early months of 2025. An avid photographer, he spent much of his life capturing moments with his friends, my grandmother, and the textures of everyday life from the 1940s to the present day.

Now, frustratingly, he can no longer take photographs, and we began instead to look back through his archive. The images were black and white, and despite having taken them himself, even he struggled to remember what was happening in many of the moments they recorded.

This gap between image and memory sparked something in me. I began to imagine the colours that were missing: the curtains, the suits, the dresses. When I returned home, I held the photographs in my hands and continued to sit with them, thinking through what they might once have contained.

I did not want to copy the photographs. I wanted to inhabit them to imagine myself into the time and space my grandad once occupied, and to live through those moments as fully as I could.

Although the paintings are based on my grandad’s photographs, they now hold a strong sense of myself within them. The colours are entirely invented, shaping the feeling and atmosphere of each scene rather than describing it faithfully.

Because I do not know many of the people in the photographs, the red hollowed face appears as a barrier a marker of uncertainty and absence. It creates a distance between myself and the figure, a sense of hollowness that separates me from the character while acknowledging the limits of memory and identification.