Artist statement: In 2017, I undertook an artist’s residency with Archisle: the Jersey Contemporary Photography Programme, to research an archive of works by French avant-garde queer artist, Claude Cahun. Whilst in Jersey, I made a series of photographs in response to, and within and beyond the sites inhabited and imagined by Cahun. My work considers the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey while imaging my body in relation to place; in these instances, sites of coastal geography and Jersey’s Neolithic ritual monuments. As with Cahun before me, I use self-portraiture to subvert the dominance of the male gaze, in depictions of my body in the landscape. This series presents my performances of an expanding vocabulary of actions and gestures, to unsettle traditional representations of the female figure – in the landscape, positing an idea of a feminist-landscape – photography predicated on the representation of women’s subjectivity. The resulting works present an expression of the female body as simultaneously precarious, absurd, active and fraught.
www.clarerae.com
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
