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.

Trees in Winter

I'm in no way a digital photographer, but I do like to mess around on my i-Phone camera! Its so convenient because its usually always on me! Anyway, yesterday, on my bus journey into the City, I was so taken with how beautiful the woods along the Skyline Drive looked, with fresh snow fall and sparkling with ice, (and with my project in mind) that I just had to snap a few pictures. There are of course limits to the control on this little camera, and you just have to accept what you get more often then not, especially when on the move as I was in a NJ Transit bus! Having played with them a little in i-Photo this morning, I am happily surprised by the images. I thought I'd share them with you.

Birth Of A New Project.

Well, it's a new year (almost Spring, in fact!), and an entirely new creative body of work is under way. I've taken a step back from the self-portraits, and have turned my camera onto my surroundings. It has taken me a few months to get as excited about this work, as I did with my last portfolio 'I Am My Body'. Photography is a strange and wondrous art form; it is obvious that you make pictures because there is something about the scene in front of you that interests you, but quite often you have no idea what that something may be. And yet out of all that doubt, usually with perseverance and faith, something unexpected and magical happens.

A bit of explanation here.... my formal education in the UK was all about concept, that is, a formulation of an idea into a visual realisation. It was not in any way about creating a beautiful thing for its own sake. An art piece had to mean something. It has taken me many years to escape from this mindset, and quite often has been more of a creative block in my work. I confess I am not fully free of it yet, but I view that as a good thing, for what I have started to achieve I believe, is a balance of visual aesthetics, craft, and idea. I tell you this because my new, as yet untitled project has been one big lesson in faith. In the beginning I had no idea what I was doing. I struggled to know why I was taking pictures of trees, yet I was compelled to keep making them. What was I trying to say with the images, what were they about?  Was it ok that the work was so different from my previous stuff? I worried about not having a singular visual voice, the force which adds coherence to your work as an artist. All this worry was getting in the way. I just had to keep shooting, and believing that all this would come together. And finally it has and to my relief, I feel a deep connection with the images.

I have posted a couple of images as examples, but they are poor renditions to the original prints, being digital snaps of the actual photographs pinned to my wall, and don't really do them justice. But you get the idea I hope.