Marjolaine Ryley explores ideas of memory, history, familial relationships and archival narratives, using photography, film, text, objects and found photographs to explore a range of themes that link her personal experience to broader social and political issues.
Ryley has produced a large body of work that interrogates the houses of her mother’s family in Belgium that she has visited regularly since childhood. The series Résidence Astral (1993-2005) is a study of Ryley’s grandmother’s apartment in Brussels photographed over a twelve year period that included the drama of a house fire and subsequent hospitalisation of her grandmother and uncle and clearance and redecoration of the home. As Val Williams has written, Ryley uses her photographs, which often focus on interior details or intimate gestures, to ‘transform this unremarkable dwelling into an allegory of growing up, combining love with fear to a remarkable degree’.