Laura McCluskey’s ode to her grandparents and The Isle of Sheppey is a golden document filled with healing

The primary colour in photographer and director Laura McCluskey’s new photo book Close To Home is gold. Golden are the fields of dried grass, the last fleeting moments of sunlight at the end of the evening, the glow that basks Laura’s childhood home in The Isle of Sheppey, on the northern coast of Kent. Golden are also the years of retirement, the sun-speckled moments at the end of a generation. Golden, too, are the flashes of nostalgic imagery, our memories of home, of youth, of playing around housing estates and exploring the world. Close To Home is the long term personal project recently published by Guest Editions, shot over a decade, from 2014 until 2024, centring around Laura’s paternal grandparents against the backdrop of the island, which her work revisists and transforms through the camera’s unique ability to connect the past with the present.

“Having long since left the island and living in London, I felt the push and pull of home and the tension of frayed family ties. I would take photos every time I visited the island for special occasions, summer holidays and Christmas with my family,” says Laura. “I would bring my camera and capture moments as they happened. Often, the need to document was subconscious, looking at my life, my background, my family to collect fragments of time. I see now, connecting to where I’m from and healing in the process.” The colour of healing washes over all of these photos, captured in real time through visits to the island. In one photo, Laura’s grandmother heals physically from a large purple bruise. Behind the camera, the viewer heals with her.

Interiors of her grandparent’s home are important – it’s the “anchor of her family”, a house where her grandmother was born and went on to live her whole life. “My nan had a unique approach to style with copper bubble wallpaper in every room and homemade lime and orange faux-fur curtains, it was the norm to us. Unaware of her distinct and somewhat eccentric taste, it was only leaving that made me look back and want to preserve; a portrait of a life,” says Laura.

Each time Laura visited, she documented the living, breathing routines of life, the way wallpapers change and decay, the way some streets stay the same, the eternal cyclicality of nature. In one photo, milky foams of sea water on the beach promise to return over and over, just like Laura, who always came back to Sheppey. Some of the places Laura remembers as a child don’t exist anymore, left to disappear or fated to decline in the face of modernisation. “Sheppey itself, cut-off from mainland Kent, faces challenges of hardship, with Sheppey East ward being recently deemed in the top 1.5 per cent most deprived areas in the country,” says Laura. “A stark reality for the communities of these seaside towns, I felt it important to capture the immediate locations surrounding the house during that decade, as a record of culture and society in a broader sense.”

The book was edited over nine months in Laura’s darkroom – but the task of editing was more challenging than shooting, due to the fragility of the images and tough curatorial process. Along with her partner Thomas (from Guest Editions), the pair put together the first edit and found a natural sequencing, driven by the narrative thread of her grandparents’ life in chronological order. “I wanted the book to feel like an object that could exist within the era and style of the house,” shares Laura. “I always envisioned it being orange or green like the curtains my nan had made – we found the exact shade in a Windsor cloth to cover the book. On the cover there is a small tip-in photo of a wall that we used as a goal to play football as kids. The back of the book in gold foil holds the title: Close to Home.”

Driven by “an instinctive need for presence”, the challenge of Close To Home was to draw closer attention, to confront mortality and to honour the love Laura and her family share. As the project progressed the photographers grandparents started to decline in health and they moved downstairs to the living room. The life they knew began to change. A focus point in the book, the martial bed, is seen throughout the decade – the viewer witnesses its undoing and eventual emptying. But something about the sun, in these photos, suggests they’re still there, occupying those rooms, the nature, the water – in healing rays, that familiar hug of light.