WORDS

‘Zest for life’ exhibition text, Andrea Ellman (Arte Globale, 2023)

For Clemson, the body is a personal, fundamental, material element in her artistic process. Her designs are informed by photographs of her body, which ultimately guide the organic contours and lines appearing in the final print. Through the use of multiple mediums and the transformations between them, Clemson creates art that is both enigmatic and deeply informed by the specificities of humanity itself.

Colours, Shapes, and Bodies

Clemson’s vibrant and lively works burst with colour and organic shapes. As displayed in her artwork, the body is stylized, with exaggerated curves that suggest a sense of movement and vitality. The overall effect is zesty and energetic as if the body is bursting with life. Her artwork celebrates the human form, rendered in a riot of colour and organic shapes that suggest the zesty nature of life itself.

‘Common Ground’ exhibition review, Laura Bivolaru (Revolv, 2022)

There is no doubt that humans are visual beings. More than half of the human brain is involved in processing visual information and, to no surprise, people would miss the sense of sight the most if they were to lose one. Without vision, the flat surfaces of our world would be meaningless – there would be no reading and writing as we know them, no drawings in caves, and certainly no photographs. But it’s also worth keeping in mind that vision is a cultural product and Western Europe is particularly indebted to (and possibly entrapped by) the scientists and artists of the Renaissance, who understood the eye as a camera obscura and invented linear perspective. Until Impressionism, the cognisant self remained an extension of the one eye that perceived the world. 

Today we understand the self as a more porous, even soft entity, that constantly negotiates the relationship with its environment through all the senses and with the help of a myriad of ideas that diverge from the image of the Man of Reason. It is in this context that Antonia Attwood and Georgia Clemson have put together Common Ground, an exhibition at ArtLacuna in London that seeks to represent the invisible emotional world. Their works are rooted in photography, a medium historically connected to the desire of capturing life precisely as it unfolds before the eyes; however, by intervening in the source code of the images and by pushing the analogue process beyond its photographic indexicality, they imaginatively explore the fluctuating, permeable boundary between the privacy of the self and the open space in which it moves and encounters others. 

Attwood’s images are originally holiday photographs, taken while on vacation in Japan in 2017 with her then partner. Following their relationship’s end, she revisits these digital photographs and introduces in their code fragments of diary entries from the time of the separation. As viewers, we cannot access her writing, instead what is shown to us is how these reflections have corrupted the images. They are joined on the wall by a print of Japan’s rail network in reverse, which has a strange three-dimensionality, and a screening of short videos from the same time taken at the Tokyo Sea Life Park. Their code has been altered as well, rendering the aquatic life forms in vivid, surreal colours, which echo both the corruption lines in her black-and-white images and Clemson’s multicoloured works. What was once a holiday now becomes a journey, as Attwood processes her own feelings by moving backwards and forwards in time, between memories, a hurtful present and the hope of a painless, balanced future. The photographs establish a clear boundary between public and private, allowing us to only imagine her self’s estrangement and subsequent healing and to project our own experiences onto them. We’re left wondering about the network of associations that these images are part of now - can they still recount happy times or are they forever scarred? Could they do both at the same time perhaps? Attwood’s works ultimately hint at the unstoppable flux of our inner worlds, which we constantly reconfigure in a constellation of thoughts and emotions with various degrees of awareness. We may want our representations of them to be as neat as a transport guide, but the truth is that we are all islands that host the energy of tumultuous metropolises. 

The metaphor of the self as an island reverberates in Clemson’s work, a series of objects displayed both on the wall and on the floor, that, although flat, share the multidimensionality of Attwood’s graphic map. Beginning by drawing bodies in various positions, the artist isolates the negative space in-between touching body parts, then creates photograms based on these shapes that defy the fixed rectangularity of the pictorial frame. These are photographic objects, or even sculptures, that with their sinuous shapes and organic colours recall the layering of landforms and natural features, together constituting an archipelago of the Other. To guide the viewers further, Clemson also created six spoken word tracks that follow an imaginary explorer’s quest to the land of ‘Another’. Titled after body parts, such as The Fingertip, The Heel, or The Innards, all under the umbrella of The Crook of the Elbow, the oral short story, voiced by artist Victoria Louise Doyle, tests the boundaries and rules of this newfound place, which eventually drives the foreign explorer away. The Other is here imagined as an autonomous territory, a nation whose environment one needs to adapt to, as well as adhere to its idiosyncratic laws in order to fully know it and to cohabit. This idea resonates with feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s argument in The Cultural Politics of Emotion that emotions shape collective bodies just as much as individuals; whoever does not align with the group’s emotions becomes an outsider to the community. Imagining the self as a nation and a collective as an individual is a powerful game that raises many questions about our being in the world - are we respectful guests on Another’s land or are we entitled conquerors? Can we truly know each other and not have our boundaries challenged? How can we establish painless relationships between ourselves? 

Clemson’s inner microcosms and Attwood’s therapeutic process illustrate contemporary photography’s potential to represent and imagine the self with a playful visual language that draws from current concerns in psychology and sociology. In its intention a nod to Symbolist photographers, who sought to represent states of mind and the links between matter and spirit, Common Ground asks what happens when we visualise the unrepresentable - does seeing open us up to new forms of knowing?

‘Photographing the Invisible’, Aliki Braine (Common Ground catalogue 2022)

“Artmaking is making the invisible visible” famously quipped Marcel Duchamp. This often-quoted creative dictum is surely not applicable to bodies of work made photographically. Photography, a medium which relies on an indexical relationship with its subject, which creates an image out of light reflecting off the visible world to inscribe itself on the photosensitive surface in the camera, seems an unlikely candidate for recording what cannot be seen. Regardless, asking photography to record the invisible is exactly what Antonia Attwood and Georgia Clemson attempt to do in the two bodies of work presented here. Both artists’ works is concerned with the representation of unseen emotional worlds and use photography to make visible these realms of memory and affect.  

Georgia Clemson’s body of work The Crook of the Elbow and other islands (2022) concerns itself with mapping her emotional state and the negative spaces of her body as if it were an island country. Made in the darkroom, Clemson uses coloured cut-out plastic shapes taken from the negative spaces around her own body to produce contact prints. These are subsequently collaged and re-trimmed into shapes which mimic the cartography of mapped archipelagos. Taking as starting point her own physical and emotional “climate and terrain”, these works are concerned with borders and frames which spill out of the traditional straight edges of photographic prints to become amorphous shapes whose edges bleed onto the gallery wall.

Similarly, Antonia Attwood seeks to make visible what she describes as the “complex emotions that we don't always outwardly see, but which have left a mark” in a set of landscape images whose digital data has been visibly corrupted. Encoding (2021) consists of images of Japan which have been visibly damaged and pixelated from the artist’s interventions, which consist of Attwood inserting private diary entries into the jpeg codes of her digital photographs. The ontological status of these images is thus brought into question by drawing attention to their existence as digital code which, once corrupted, refutes any claim they might have to representation.

Both these bodies of work, as well as seeking to record the invisible, raise a related question in their determination to make visible the very fabric of the photographic medium. Clemson dematerialises the photographic process by eschewing the camera, negative and linear borders, while Attwood makes the photograph’s constitutive materials visible through its pixelated glitches. The history of photography is peppered with praise for its own invisibility as a medium; when we look at a photograph we only ‘see’ - or at least acknowledge - the image it carries or represents. The paper or the emulsion, the depth and weight of the object itself, are rarely the focus of the viewer’s attention. The purported invisibility of the artist’s medium – the notion that the greatest art is supremely illusionistic – long predates photography. The artists featured here are concerned with taking invisible and intangible private human emotions and making them visible by using a medium which is usually used to record the visible. It is a fruitful paradox.

Highlights of London Art Fair ‘I Spy’, Brett Rogers, Director of the Photographers Gallery (LAF Selects 2021)

“Clemson has responded to lockdown in a very inventive manner combining her love of the tactility of the colour print in arresting new collages. Combining representational images with more abstract forms she has developed works of great visual impact.”

‘Five highlights from London Art Fair’, Marie-Claire Chappet, (Harper’s Bazaar 2021)

“As their name suggests, Arte Globale calls itself a ‘gallery of the world’. Their international mix of handpicked artists are both upcoming and established, and the gallery has a wide and impressive reach, staging offerings at the Venice Biennale and other world-class art fairs. For London Art Fair, they have chosen to showcase the work of the capital’s own Georgia Clemson, whose photography collages have a striking Matisse-like flair.”

‘Catching feelings with Georgia Clemson’ Interview by Maria Teresa Sacchi at Arte Globale (Artsy 2020)

When did you start photographing and why?

Photography has only been a part of my practice for around five years and I would never call myself a photographer because I think that would be a misleading description. 

The reason that image-making gained a greater significance in my process was practical – a lack of space. I had recently finished my first degree at Central Saint Martins and I was able to rent a studio on my own in New Cross, South East London. Obviously as I was just starting out I could only afford a small space, very unlike the large studios I had worked in at art school. I found that photography gave me an opportunity to capture unlimited images and bring those inspirations back to the studio to work with as a kind of source material. 

My second stint at university birthed an obsession with the analogue process and I discovered great potential in reducing the ‘photograph’ as an object to its basic ingredients – light, shadow, colour and the frame. I truly love pushing the boundary of what a photograph can be by using experimental methods in the darkroom. The work I am currently making now rarely includes a ‘traditional’ photographic image.   

When you moved to London, were you excited? Did London change your point of view about your artistic practice?

I made London my home almost a decade ago and so my entire artistic practice has developed during my time here, so yes you could say London changed my point of view. I was very excited to move to London as any young person is when they make their first steps alone in the world. It is a tough place but also a great place to experience art and meet creative people. I feel really lucky to live here in Hackney and the difficult circumstances of lockdown have strengthened the sense of community.  

Who or what influenced you? 

My experiences in therapy have been the biggest influence on my work, because it has taught me so much about what we all need and want from our interactions with each other, be they romantic or friendly. In my sessions we discussed the concept of ‘holding’. In the therapeutic relationship this is applied in an emotional way by making that relationship boundaried and secure. It creates a space where a person can express their most vulnerable thoughts and fears. Since then I have wanted to find ways to apply this concept to other people, and to images, the idea of one body as a container for another. 

I love Matisse, and the drawings of Picasso and Jean Cocteau. My favourite artist of the moment changes a lot, but I always return to these three to inspire me. I am not sure how much they influence my work directly, but they motivate me to keep making things that I find beautiful.  

Your works express a delicate yet groundbreaking narrative about people, relationships and art. Do you look at pop-culture references for starting points in your work? Or what else?

The starting points in my work come often from forms and shapes created by my own body, since my aim is to express the potential of the body as a container for love, memory and sensation, and as a holder for another. Communicating this through images feels completely natural, as photographs have these same possibilities to hold your feeling and evoke a memory. The skin, just like photographic paper is a sensitive and volatile surface, the smallest touch can be the most impactful. I think my making process is a physical working through of what each human can offer another, their bare essentials. 

As for pop culture references, I don’t usually use them as a starting point but you only have to look at social media to see an abundance of memes and posts warning of ‘catching feelings’ and being ghosted by dates. I think for many, getting emotionally hurt is too big a risk to take, so romantic intimacy grows a sort of melancholia around it. Recently I enjoyed the novels of Sally Rooney, and I think her books express this condition rather well. The state of simultaneously craving connection and finding it intolerable has been the starting point for my work for the last three years. 

The way you produced the series Most of the time we are great together shows you are not afraid to take risks, do you have multiple series going on at the same time? Do you experiment with different techniques?

I am currently working on more than one body of work, but in the initial stages I rarely set out to make a series. Each piece is a whole that can stand independently. 

Experimenting with different techniques is a large part of my practice, I find the darkroom fertile ground for innovation despite the fact that it is thought of as a place for historical and traditional techniques. I think this is what makes it such an exciting place for inventing new processes. 

My work organically develops into three dimensional forms at times. I think in general my practice creates a healthy balance of process-driven and concept-driven pieces.   

What are you working on at the moment? How is the global pandemic affecting you?  

Like so many artists, the pandemic has deeply affected the way I work and the ideas that inform what I make. When the virus started to spread, I was working on a new series in the darkroom that I was very energised about and had perfected a new technique that I felt I had not seen anywhere else. I was due to exhibit some of the first works to come out of this series in mid-March. When the lockdown started this exhibition had to be cancelled. At first I felt very disappointed but soon things came into perspective and I felt glad just to have my health when so many others did not.

Being at home presented challenges at first due to the fact that I cannot access the facilities I would normally use to make work, primarily the darkroom, but also digitally-aided machinery. Luckily, I had access to my archive of darkroom prints, including all the test prints and strips that I had ever made. I don’t know why I kept all of these things at the time but now I feel I must have kept them for a reason, as I have been able to revisit ideas that I thought I had permanently left behind, and find a new resonance within them. I have mainly been creating collages that incorporate found material in my home, my C-Prints, drawings and paintings. At its heart my work is about human connection and I worked through this in a very meaningful way as I revisited my collection of prints made in happier times. Most of the photographs were of people and places I had visited on my travels, and these are things we are all longing for. Deconstructing this material to explore colour, shape, texture and composition was like a meditation on the capacity of photographs to hold memory and emotions. All of my work is personal but the works I have made in lockdown are especially dear to me. 

2019 Graduates special issue, Caroline Hunter (Source Photographic Review, 2019)

“I was intrigued by this project. It stood out for me, as it explores the idea of a photograph as a tangible 3D object using fabric and other structures to achieve this. Clemson is examining the relationship between the photograph and the frame, challenging our conventional idea of the photograph always being the dominant partner and the central image within a frame. I liked the playful approach and ambition of the project as well as the analogy that it makes between merging both image and frame together.”

RCA Photography 2019, Chiara Nonino (Vogue Italia 2019)

My work lives somewhere between photography and sculpture. I love to push the boundaries of traditional media and would describe myself as an image-maker first and foremost. I came to choose photography as my language when I was working in my first tiny studio a few years ago. As an artist working across disciplines I felt challenged by the lack of space and turned to photography because of the ability it has to communicate ideas instantly and directly. Now I can’t imagine my practice without creating my own images. My work has come to pivot around the relationship between myself and my photographic subjects, and how challenging conventions can deepen that connection.