The Booths of Oak Lodge

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. (Sontag, 1977) Ruth Frost made photographs that responded to and elaborated the lives of those who lived in Richmond s historic Oak Lodge for the 2009 Ten Days on the Island exhibition, Trust. Ruth used light to illuminate spaces and objects; by following its movement through the house during the day, light became a metaphor for the lives lived in the 1840s house. Frost's images were exhibited in the house with details from a conservation plan that gave clues to different residents uses of spaces and an audio installation relating stories associated with the house. Yet the silence surrounding Jane Elizabeth the persistent denials and the refusal to examine her or to determine what had indeed happened to her might have represented her onlychance to regain respectability and put the matter behind her. On 17 December 1834 Jane Wylde married James Richard Booth, captain in the Royal Navy, at St George s Cathedral, Cape Town. and disappeared from the historical record. (McKenzie, 2004) With references to Ruth Frost s work for Port Arthur Project in 2007, this paper and presentation considers Ruth s Oak Lodge project as a catalyst for linking two previously unconnected stories, one of scandal and the other of an apparently ordinary life that spanned two British colonies. In doing so, the paper demonstrates Frost's representational methodology and site-specific art can uncover and reveal previously unknown histories.