‘Roadkill Family Album’, begun in 2000, is an ongoing project by the artist Nigel Grimmer. Each photograph in the series depicts a member of Grimmer’s family, or a close friend, lying, apparently dead, by the side of a road wearing the mask of an animal. Although explicitly staged events, the images conjure up feelings of abandonment and sorrow. The animals seem to have expired, or to have given up the will to live, but the underlying human presence creates a curious tension. Each year, Grimmer adds at least one image to the series; the current series includes photographs from around…

‘Roadkill Family Album’, begun in 2000, is an ongoing project by the artist Nigel Grimmer. Each photograph in the series depicts a member of Grimmer’s family, or a close friend, lying, apparently dead, by the side of a road wearing the mask of an animal. Although explicitly staged events, the images conjure up feelings of abandonment and sorrow. The animals seem to have expired, or to have given up the will to live, but the underlying human presence creates a curious tension. Each year, Grimmer adds at least one image to the series; the current series includes photographs from around the UK, France, Japan, USA and Ireland.

Nigel Grimmer’s art practice explores the relationship between public and personal imagery and its influence on the production of identity. An archive of ephemera from popular culture, including comic books, action figures, joke shop props, pop songs, snapshots and film stills, is drawn into his personal narratives and then returned to the public realm. Rendered both strange and familiar, Grimmer presents an alternative to ‘mainstream’ culture, an acknowledgement of his experience by the conveyance of a unique sensibility, a subculture, formed by the selection and editing of this material.

Friends and family members have entered Grimmer’s imagery through the continual reworking of the family album format. The traditional family album images are shaped by strict but generally unacknowledged conventions that form a series of fixed narratives. Within Grimmer’s ‘Roadkill Family Album’ the constructed nature of snapshot photography is emphasised. The images do not try to imply naturalness or spontaneity, or give an insight into the personality of the sitter. During various holidays abroad and trips to relatives Grimmer’s subjects don cheap throwaway joke-shop masks in order to have their portrait taken; his mother appears as an owl, his father as a frog. Although the sitter’s identity is obscured, the image still fulfils the role of memento of the trip for both photographer and subject. The masks reference the animals Grimmer learnt to identify as a child from the corpses laying on the side of the road, the animal reduced to a still image. The masks also recall characters from pantomime that now belong to a lost childhood.

Nigel Grimmer was born in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. He completed his Masters in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 1998. Since graduating, Grimmer has exhibited throughout the UK and has shown work in Germany, France and Switzerland. Grimmer has curated a number of exhibitions in London and his work is regularly published in a variety of journals. Arts Council East and The Elephant Trust currently support his work. During 2006 Nigel Grimmer exhibited in Standpoint, Lounge, VTO and Fosterart in London, as well as Shrewsbury Museum and Gallery, Surface Gallery in Nottingham and MAC in Birmingham; in 2007, he exhibited at The Margaret Harvey Gallery in St. Albans and Fieldgate in London. Nigel Grimmer has recently produced bodies of work in Tokyo and Berlin. He currently lives and works in both London and Norfolk.