"Art Is A Risk. Take It"

Good things are brewing! I can feel it. Summer is close (disturbingly, it feels as though we are already in mid in August, such is the oppressive heat surrounding me as I write) and it holds promise. My lips are sealed...for now.

But I can let you know about "Human Beings II", a brilliant group exhibition exploring the disability experience that is currently on show at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago until June 20th. My piece "Spastic" was selected by artist and curator of this show, Riva Lehrer.

"Spastic" from the series "This Is You, This Is Me", 2012

The exhibition is also part of a wider festival in Chicago called "Bodies of Work", a mix of dance, theater and literature aimed at creating a greater awareness and understanding of what it means to be disabled through the arts. I particularly love and identify with their wonderful tag line "Art Is A Risk. Take It" and feel incredibly honored to be participating in their discussion. The festival runs until May 25th so not too many days left, but if you are in Chicago I encourage you to catch one or more of the remaining events.

My photograph caught the eye of a local journalist, Lindsey Peterson, and I was duly interviewed for a story "Living with Disability on Display in Rare Art Exhibit" in Medill Reports Chicago. My first foray into print...albeit digital print!

from the series "I Am My Body" 2010

All images © Claire Gilliam

Another quick word, my work from "I Am My Body" is still on view at the Art Factory in Paterson, NJ. This memorial weekend, The Paterson Arts Council is holding their fifth Annual Art Walk so it'll be the perfect opportunity to catch the show at this particularly amazing location.

Exhibition at Art Factory

I'm very excited to announce that my series "I Am My Body" will be on display at the Art Factory in Patterson, New Jersey as part of a group photography show "Art Factory Photography". The opening reception will be on 9th March 2013 from 2pm to 5pm and will be up for a month. If you are in the NY Metropolitan area, it would be lovely to see you there. There will be tours of the whole centre which is quite amazing for artists of all kinds.

"I Am My Body XIV" in situ

Installing my work

 Instagram images © Claire Gilliam

New Work

Over the autumn months, I embarked on a new body of photographs. I suppose really it is a continuation of the ideas and concepts I've had about the human body and in particular my own disabled body, a deeper exploration of the images I made for the portfolio "This Is You, This Is Me".

I have introduced two new elements to my process: inspired by small photograms I made in college sixteen years ago I have begun to make life sized body photograms which allow me to examine the physical imprint that is left within a space, as well as thoughts of trace, presence and absence. Within these images I am playing with layering and text. These are works very much in progress, forever evolving and in the next few weeks I will post a few for you to see. Here though, is an Instagramed sneak peak to whet your appetite!

I have also taken on a collaborative partner, my husband, who under my direction aims my camera at me. His eye adds a new dimension to the work, extending the experience of being gazed upon and examined through somebody else's eyes and bringing into play the notions of sensuality, physicality and sexuality.

This work is as yet untitled but I thought I'd share with you a few of the new images. All prints are printed on semi-matt warm tone paper in the darkroom.

                                                                                   All images © Claire Gilliam

"This Is You, This Is Me" - An Ongoing Portfolio

There is no escaping the body. Each of us occupies this mass of tissue, muscle, bone and skin we call our body and we all own complex feelings about it, some positive, some negative. We have good days and bad days, often dependent on the perceptions of others.

This new work explores my relationship to my own ‘disabled’ body, both personally and in connection to society’s view of what is normal or perfect. It continues where my portfolio “I Am My Body” left off, delving into the discomforts and insecurities that come with pain, the pleasures and delights of what could be or what in fact is just the reality of my body. Each photograph is a small tale or contemplation that exists and evolves within my body at any time. As a whole, the project reflects longings, desires, hurts and limitations as well as mapping the physical history of my body.

The photographs also contain memories. The act of photographing myself repeatedly brought forth remembrances of surgeries and falls, of other people’s stares and their reactions to me. Many of the photographs utter the unkind words or enquiries that are often asked without consent, catching me off guard, and sometimes shocking me into remembering that I was supposedly different from everybody.

But actually this is a falsehood. The truth is there is no such thing as the perfect body as society will have you believe. The body pictured here might just as well be yours with the same longings, desires, insecurities and abnormalities as mine. It’s just pictured a little bit differently. 

All images are printed in the darkroom on 16"x 20" Ilford semi-matt warm-tone paper and toned in gold. 

2012

Emergence

Pin-up

This Might Be Your Body

Body Is Experiencing

Look At Me

Spastic

This Body Is Just Strange

Disregard

Thoughts of Venus

Flawed

Balancing Act

Guarded

In A Perfect World, There Is The Perfect Body

Reflection

All images © Claire Gilliam

On Reflection - All Things Must Pass

2012 has been a strange and curious year so far. In the very first three months, I experienced what could surely be considered every emotion under the sun, and intensely so. Shock, worry, stress, uncertainty, grief, joy, hope, death, loss, love... I felt it all. It was a roller coaster ride from which there was no way off. I had no choice but to hold on tightly to my conviction that I would make it to the end in one piece. Sometimes though I had my doubts, I did wonder how I would come through it all. I am still wondering but with less apprehension then three months ago when it seemed as though a huge part of my life had come to an end and all I felt was a massive void.

Towards the end of January, after having just returned from the UK for the Christmas break, I received the dreaded phone call I knew would come one day to tell me that my grandmother, who had raised me as her daughter since I was a baby, had fallen gravely ill. The prognosis was not good and she wasn't expected to live through the night. There is something dreadful about taking a long distance flight in these emergency situations, wondering if upon landing you've made it in time. I could hardly look at my uncle's face as he stood waiting for me in the Arrivals lounge the very next day. I knew his expression would tell it all with one swift glance and I didn't want to know. It was alright for the moment but that was only to be the start of it. My mum was an extraordinary woman who turned out to have more strength in her then we could ever have imagined (which was already a great deal). She would confound the doctors' expectations who, on a weekly basis, would suggest that the end was close, we should prepare ourselves but who were proven wrong to the very last week of her life.

Rosalind

Winter months turned to Spring, a period of time (ten weeks in all) that exist in my memory as daily visits to St Helier Hospital, where my mum lay stricken and silent with the effects of her debilitating stroke. My sister and I formed a mantra of sorts to help navigate our way through the quagmire of emotion and stress we both felt. We'd say it to one another frequently throughout the day and with some urgency near the end when it was clear she was going downhill and we had to make the painful decision to withdraw the feeding tube keeping her alive in a nether land state of non-existence. It was simply this - 'step by step'. And by sticking to this philosophy, we found that we could gradually move forward and take in what was so impossible to bear. 

Bird

But the experience of journeying with my mum to the end of her life has left me changed as I'm sure it has for all my family. Images float unabated each day of a moment in time at the hospital, some beautiful like the extraordinary times my mum would seemingly come back into consciousness and realize her family were with her. She'd smile then, blow us kisses and roll her eyes in the way that was uniquely mum as if to say, look at this ridiculous situation I've found myself in. We'd laugh with tears in our eyes, finding hope and a belief that mum was still with us after all, just waiting for the day when she'd be unlocked from her damaged body. Others are more haunting such as any moment of her last days when her features shrunk and her face became that of someone else entirely; or the silent tears she let flow as her youngest grandchildren said their final farewells a few days before she died.  They are as vivid to me now as if it were yesterday. I don't mind... I am grateful that I could be there, feel the close connection with my family and experience as intensely as I did. I want to remember those precious days truthfully despite the pain that accompanies many of these memories.

Precautionary Measure

C-Block Corridor

The Last day

I took to taking a few photographs every now and again as I sat in her room or wandered down the hospital corridors to get yet another cup of coffee and panini from Costa Coffee. I felt I needed to capture those fleeting  moments of the way the light fell or a feeling felt. I snapped away on my iPhone, so this intense and surreal time could be frozen in time and stored for prosperity. I photographed in my mum's house too, my childhood home where a wealth of memories and experience are stored with in the walls. I was losing this too.

Final Morning at Sprucedale 

Leaving Sprucedale Gardens

Lately I've found myself thinking about George Harrison's well known lyric, 'All Things Must Pass'. The simplicity and the profound truth of these words seem particularly relevant to me this year. I am beginning to accept the loss of my mum and have a glimmer of understanding of how change, even unexpected and shocking change that feels like your world has been turned upside down, can be an impetus for moving forward. I have come to see that life in every facet is progression, it is never static and so it is in death too, cliched as this statement is...'There is no growth without change'. There is some comfort in this. Although it doesn't make the feeling of loss diminish completely, it does urge me to be open to new possibilities, think more creatively, to open my eyes more fully, listen more closely, be mindful of my past whilst thinking forward into the future and engage with the experience of living intensely.

All images © Claire Gilliam

The Slow Whisper of Trees- A portfolio

Trees are history, they hold our memories, they have seen things. They are life, love, loss. They are figures upon our landscape essential and necessary, but often taken for granted, or never really seen. Trees are beautiful but can have a menace about them too, stick thin and towering sometimes, bent and knarled at others. Solitary sentients of our world or pulsating swathes of forest. They have stood as guardians over us for centuries, as silent witnesses. They bear the marks of living upon their bodies, much as we do.

The Slow Whisper Of Trees is in part a visual poem of all these ideas, but it is also an exploration of my own fears, and wonderment as I make my way in this world. A small musing on the cyclical nature of things; of memory, loss, impermanance, balance. A reminder of the interconnectness of all things.

All images © Claire Gilliam

It started with a whisper.

That sound upon the air

Frozen, held, suspended

Then propelled forward

Into time, towards End.

Imprinted upon the land

Stories are told then

Of this cyclical life

And our place in it.

Our birth, our death.

These are our whispers

Echoed upwards, and on

Circles of thought and 

Connected history 

Cradled by long limbs.

Amongst the deep crevices of

Bark and branch

Inky memories etch their way

To coil our loss and love

tightly bound, taken root.

For anyone who cares to look,

Delve deep and long

Or to quietly sit and listen,

The slow whisper grows loud

To tell beyond our decay.

Mysterious Meadowlands

As I've been working on my project in the city, I have been commuting into NY by bus two or three times a week. It can get a little tedious but some stretches of the journey pass through interesting and beautiful areas; Long Pond, Monksville and Wanaque Reservoirs enroute to the Skyline Drive, NJ. Each time I pass, I take in the view, and each time, there is something different and magical to behold; like the dark primeaval stumps sticking out from the frozen whiteness of the winter's ice, or the mist steaming above the water on a crisp early morning. 

Then there is the area known as the Meadowlands, about two miles outside of Manhattan in New Jersey. I'm fascinated by this place, it's a strange mix of industry, deteriorating buildings, new hotels and wetlands, and I can imagine that most people simply do not see it. It's just a place to drive through quickly with out much thought. Indeed, at first glance the area is a mass of highways shuttling commuters back and forth to NYC, punctuated with pylons, and all manner of industrial towers, bordered with unattractive looking suburban towns named Secaucus, East Rutherford, Kearney, together with the Giants Stadium, and Continental Airlines Arena, with big billboards announcing such acts as Rod Stewart, and the American Idol top 10 finalists. They've even broken ground to build one of the biggest shopping malls in the country. It all reminds me of Walker Evans' photograph of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in which you can clearly see the layers of industrial and human development expand within the environment over time.

1935 - Graveyard and Steel Mill, Bethlehem, PA

But there is something very mysterious about the Meadowlands too. I see an incredible beauty and life in the grasses, and the waterways. It changes too with the quality of light. I have even found myself not minding the made-made scars that have intruded onto the natural landscape when everything is bathed in the fading glow of early evening. There's something very interesting about the juxtaposition, highlighting human nature to conquer the environment, to its detriment or not. I know nothing about the history of the Meadowlands but my interest has been sparked. Actually, my imagination had been captured a few years ago, after I read a National Geographic article about the renewal of these wetlands after decades of pollution, (my step son told me the other day that the place reeks of sulphur, though I wouldn't know about that since I am sealed in a NJ transit bus and haven't set foot on the lands themselves), and by Mark Helprin's descriptions of the Marshlands overlooking Manhattan (set in early industrial age) in his spectacular novel, Winter's Tale. Although I am not nearly as poetic and lyrical as Helprin, the other day I was inspired to write my own ode to the Meadowlands.........

Journey Home

Deep impenetrable grey

The backsplash colour of my journey home

Dusk slips to night and industry

suddenly illuminates it's beauty.

Meadowlands frame cell towers 

and factory columns,

their myriad shapes radiate against muted skies.

Then grasses and strips of silver water

give way to habitation.

Row upon row of clapboard 

crammed across my horizon.

Asphalt rivers cut a diagonal line above

silky metallic threads of liquid.

Struts reflected in the smoky stillness

turning this apparent ugliness on its head.

I travel this way roundtrip:

New York State, New Jersey, Manhattan

Re turn.

The patchwork topography of this waterlogged marsh

beckons as I pass, decoding its history

before progress marched in.

This strip of land, remnant of bygone time,

holding skyscrapers and rambling sprawl alike,

has never looked so beautiful.

I leave you with some images and some links of photographer, Joshua Lutz. His first monograph was published last year, and is entitled Meadowlands, and is a decade long visual exploration of this area and it's people. The images are incredible. Also worth watching is this short video podcast in which Lutz talks about the project.