In their recordings of private lives and private perspectives on the public, home movies are invaluable documents of everyday lived experiences. Home movies reveal much about time and the society in which they were made. The family's desire to inscribe themselves into the conventions of the technology, and all that this was associated with, means that the films are not always what they seem; their familiarity can be deceptive.

Home movies footage evokes nuclear family life, particularly in the suburbs. It suggests the commonplace, the ordinary. Yet reworking these films into my own projects, I have to manipulate their context and their surface to reveal these meanings other than as nostalgic or quaint.

When you think about it, they allow the forever-outsider, the spectator, to be seen and to recognise themselves.