Kenna Robinson

This kind of image proliferates my father’s family archive: two men, one young, one old, standing shoulder to shoulder in military garb. It is a stiff and heavily performed pose, one I have begun to see reflected in the images of my father and brother. Looking at this photograph, I wonder when my father’s father started shaking his hand in place of a hug. I know it must have happened in his teens - that is when it happened for my little brother. Nearly every man in my paternal line has served in some form. I have observed this service inform and warp the ways the men in my family interact - it has certainly informed my father’s perhaps unconscious decision to remove physicality from his relationship with his son. For my father who lost his own dad so young, his continued service provides a space in which he can feel close to him. The values disseminated within the Canadian Forces are the values both he and I were raised on and the performance of those values both professional and social bring security in grief and in fatherhood. Using cyanotype and cotton I reproduce this image of masculinity within my paternal family providing a soft and precious space for the hard act I know to be an act of love be performed. With stitching and fabric, I meet this traditional masculine gesture with a practice historically rooted in the feminine as a way of asserting my own observations of these dynamics and conducting tentative care for this past version of my father.