Working with issues or ideas in art, or purely with materials, confers a certain kind of comfortable distance for the practicing artist. However bound up he or she becomes with their work, there is always the ability to put it to one side and walk away. But for some artists it’s precisely their experiences of home and family, which are the source of their work. Trying to recall their own history, they work through the often painful process of selective remembering and selective forgetting.

Richard Blass’ video portrait of his parents exemplifies his commitment to engaging with the often uncomfortable constellation of forces that congeal around the family. His parents, who Blass admits "are reluctant participants ", find themselves caught up in his unrehearsed psychodramas. Blass’ video initially appears to have been conceived of as the kind of time based portrait of his parents, familiar in many respects to Gillian Wearing’s video portraits. However as the drama unfolds, a considerably more fraught portrait materialises.

Attempting to pose his parents in their front room Blass struggles with his lights. He just can’t get it right, his father’s stiffly posed body casts awkward shadows across the menacing presence of their large fire and chimney. Mum and dad attempt to be helpful, mum puts an orange on the floor to mark her position, dad chips in with well meaning, but useless advice. Meanwhile the harsh lights continue to blast directly into mum and dads eyes, while Blass increasingly exasperated, starts to change from the dutiful, respectful son, to an aggressive, impatient despot. For a while the piece remains amusing. Recollections of similar parental battles spring to mind. The challenges to parental authority, the adult locking of antlers between the now independent child and the once powerful parents etc.

However as the work develops, it becomes more and more obvious that Blass’ use of his parents as complicit puppets for his work has a darker, deeper aspect to it. Blass has written that he uses his parents "as a vehicle for exploring history, specifically the holocaust". Watching the video over time the power relations of filming become clearer. Blass’ lighting and his demands that they stand rigidly still take on the unpleasant connotations of subjected souls caught in the beam of searchlights while waiting for deportation. The psychic drama, which had initially seemed to be no more than a recreation of personal power politics, becomes transformed into an attempt to recreate an abject moment of twentieth century history – something his parents had first hand experience of. For Blass the horror of the holocaust has come in its literal depiction "too brutal, too painful to look at." For him his work is therefore an attempt to "other ways of exploring this event."

The artist Jo Spence, whose work was similar involved with an attempt to unravel her own family history, once asked "how can we begin to change the portrait, to change ideas of what should and should not go into family albums?" Blass, like Spence seems to have found a way of producing a portrait infinitely richer than any domestic snap. "Portrait of my parents" is a fitting tribute and memorial to the intense, occasionally torturous bonds of love between parent and child.