Ville Mona: a proper kind of house

Marjolaine Ryley's photographs are intimate, psychologically charged portraits of domestic spaces, which explore the ways in which we experience family life through familiarity with particular places. 'Villa Mona' is the name of the home on the Belgian coast which the artist's family have had a long association with and which she has visited since childhood. Ryley has returned to the house repeatedly to create a cumulative portrait of both the building and its inhabitants. Each photograph quietly observes the traces of human presence - the residues of past lives - that have accrued there. The artist's approach is, as she remarks, is "like that of an archaeologist, sifting, revealing and preserving through the act of visually recording". The images, accordingly, are filled with mementoes and personal possessions accrued over the 20th century. The evocative, elegiac atmosphere which Ryley creates seems to make palpable the passing of time.