Mexico's Lost Daughters

After having experimented in all these different ways to try and capture a shadow I found myself to be stuck and not sure how to continue. I read an article in the Observer Magazine about the kidnappings of young pretty girls from rural Mexican villages who are sold into prostitution. As a feminist I have always been intersted in women's issues around the world and these stories really moved me. The fact that the girls are so young and have their childhood stolen from them made me think of the already transient nature of childhood and how this is being violently sped up. I was also effected by the images of the hiding spaces and 'shelters' that are created by the families.

'To avoid the traffickers, families are now taking to extreme measures. Some women hide in secret shelters and homes, the buildings disguised from the outside to look like shopfronts. Many poor farming families have secret places in their shacks where they can hide their sisters and daughters from the constant raids from drug traffickers. A woman who sells beaded necklaces on a beach in Acapulco tells me how her parents created a small crawl space between the wall and the refrigerator where she would be sent to hide if they heard that there were drug traffickers roaming around in their SUVs or on motorcycles. "There were shootings and kidnappings all the time," she tells me. "We don't live there any more. Nobody lives in that village any more."

As I had been led by the idea of transcience I wanted to perhaps represent the transcience and disruption of childhood through the transcient motion of light. The idea of hiding spaces and shelters led me to think immediately of childhood dens or wendy houses and how these can only be used for a small period of time and the inevitability of growing too big as well as linking this to the darker inevitable reality that the young girls will continued to be found and taken. I wanted to try and capture the shadows within an enclosed space and use the shape of a small simple house, alluding to childhood.