Daniel

Daniel Regan is a photographic artist exploring mental health.

His mum Teena died in 2019.

“I don’t have much of my mum’s, but I do have some things. Objects that aren’t hers but are of her.

A rose from her garden. Some flowers I bought myself after she died and kept for two years.

I made a whole series of images of flowers, photographed in a very dark, Gothic way. I put the prints in a copper and glass box in my studio.

I told myself that when the box was full, I’d move onto something else.

But of course, that’s a very naive way to think about grief.

It’s going to be full and it’s not the end. It’s just full.

When I was young, I was obsessed with documenting things. Mundane things like going to the supermarket with my mum.

But I’d also photograph my body when I would self harm. It was my way of evidencing what was happening to me; of figuring out my body as a young, queer person.

When we write something, we have a shared understanding of the definition of the words. I felt safer creating images that hinted at how I was feeling.

I didn’t have the words, but it didn’t matter.

I filmed my mum talking about my suicide attempt in 2008.

She was reading from an email she’d sent me. My friend said it sounded like she was making a statement to the police.

It went onto one of my many, many hard drives and I forgot about it. It was too close, too raw.

Years later, when she was dying, I remember having an argument with someone at the hospital. Saying, “I need to document some of this. If you knew my mum and the things I’ve asked her to do, she’d be fine with it.”

I made some images on my phone instead, which I never do. They’re just awful. Her arms and her neck where the tubes were going in.

She was hooked up to so many machines she’d become a machine. All life and soul disappears in Intensive Care.

But maybe there’ll be something there in the future. Those photos might be a gift from the past.

Everything in the exhibition I did ten months after she died was about transitions, transience, loss.

I put up prints I’d made of plants on a wall. As they were exposed to the light, they faded away. That was the whole point. Things disappear. 

I was crying constantly, so I collected my tears and a neuroscientist put them under a microscope. They looked like ferns.

It was such an opportunity to figure out loss, to figure out this disentanglement of me and my mum. She’s still a part of me, I’m still a part of her. But we’re separated.

Who am I without her?

On our wedding day, my husband and I gave out notepaper and envelopes. We asked our guests to write down their hopes and dreams.

When it came to posting them back a year later, she was gone. So I put the envelope in a drawer.

Every time I opened it, I’d avoid looking at it. And then a couple of days before her anniversary, I opened it and re-read it again.

She’d written about getting her mental health in check so that she could live a more fulfilling life. There’s something really beautiful in it. It’s a message I could have written for myself.

I photographed it. The message that wasn’t meant for me. All the indentations. The tear where I’ve opened it is like a scar.

What’s hers and what’s mine?

She creeps into my life still. And I’m still making work about her; about us.”