UK based photographer and clinical psychologist Andy Wiener has, over a 35 year career  explored the links between identity and memory, especially in the realm of family heritage. In his early career he used photographic masks to explore how the past shapes one’s identity, through a fusion of past and present.

In the series, Visitation Scenes, he made photographic masks from the faces in a personal archive of old family photographs of his European Jewish ancestors. He travelled to places where these relatives had lived, and to Auschwitz where some had died, and asked people there to wear the masks. By doing so he created the illusion that these people had come back to life, thus posing questions around how family history and trauma threads through our present.

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During lockdown in 2020 Andy began experimenting with a new canvas for faces from his past. Regularly walking in his local woodland in Hertfordshire, England he felt drawn to the mythology and mysticism of trees. What resulted is Ancestor Trees where he again summons the spirits of his ancestors this time as sentient inhabitants of an ancient English Forest.