The Sunny Side of the Island

Project Description: "The Sunny Side of the Island investigates an ancestor and namesake Colonel Harry Compton, who was awarded a township of land (around 20,000 acres) by King George III in Prince Edward Island, Canada following his service in the Irish Rebellion in 1798. Consequently, he lived on the island between 1804-1816. The series is named so as it was his son Thomas Compton who named the city 'Summerside' where the series is based as it was located on 'The Sunny Side of the Island'. This project contextualises itself within the conversation surrounding colonial diaspora in ‘new world’ settlements and the remnants left behind through analysing the long-term aspects of individuals such as Colonel Harry Compton and his life on the island as seen through his descendants, the institutions he organised and the geographic placements of locations he deemed noteworthy. The land and title to it rightfully belongs with the Mi’kmaq indigenous community who occupied the land before he and ‘the crown asserted sovereignty over it’. Themes of the strangely familiar, uncanny and the eerie are explored through the detailing of memory work from having reflectively engaged in making imagery and handling family archives to search for an individual hidden in plain sight. The Comptons on the island who still live on the same land where Harry Compton lived knew nothing before him and I knew nothing of him after except the folkloric stories of his life which we both grew up knowing despite never having met or known of one another’s existence. It was this unplotted space between us to which I responded to. As the first Harry Compton since him, confronting the past, inverting the gaze, and neutralising the myths surrounding individuals like him opens the conversation of what remains of these figures within the discursive framework of colonialism and what they suppressed within landscapes which are held in the present”. Project Review: “Taking an anthropological approach to handling archives, image making and in-depth research, Compton draws a contemporary portrait of how his ancestor shaped places and lives, through striking portraits of descendants and following the trail of records and locations. He draws a map for us to plot questions around hereditary power and coloniality” Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator, The Photographers Gallery