14/08/2026
This is a small installation I created for my museum show ALIVE: In the Face of Death, at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 2013.
The heart is made up of pictures of my Mum, Dad, Sister and myself over forty years.
The ‘Alive’ project was inspired by the deaths of both my parents, within a few weeks of each other, in early 2006. At the time I didn’t know how to deal with their deaths and this exhibition and documentary was me exploring why I was so unprepared.
I described the experience as ‘one of the most challenging projects I’ve ever been involved in’. It came from me needing to look at life in the face of death and, more personally, ‘to try to look my personal fear of death in the eye’.
For the project, I photographed people living with terminal illness, people who had faced death and survived, and people whose work brought them into contact with death every day. The project was also documented by the BBC Two Culture Show film Alive: Rankin Faces Death, which you can find on YouTube.
For the exhibition, I made this installation from my own family photographs, arranged into a heart. Weddings, holidays, relatives, snapshots, all the normal pictures families accumulate without really thinking about them. It was my little nod to my Mum and Dad.
What interested me was how time changes a photograph. Something completely ordinary when it is taken can become one of the most valuable things you have when the person in it is no longer there. But still be of very little value to another person who didn’t know them.
A critic could easily have derided this as sentimental rubbish. But I think we sometimes dismiss sentimentality too easily.
We make family photos because we love people, and we keep them because we know, whether consciously or not, that people and moments disappear.
Time turns the ordinary into something precious.
The pictures in ALIVE were never really about death. They were about the vitality, humour, optimism, and individuality of the people in them. Basically the same idea bit from the other direction.
A show about mortality that, in the end, became a celebration of being alive.
