"Fantasy is about dreams, desire, unreality and the unconscious, whilst ethnography is about human behaviour in real social situations. Is that a helpful reading for your own work – a mixture of fantasy and ethnography?" - Max Delany.
I re-stage remembered experiences, not necessarily to understand them, but remake them. I can tell a lie. I don't have to be truthful. What happens with hindsight and experience is that you learn the layered outcomes of certain situations, so you can't place yourself in those situations anymore. Memory conditions every action in the present.
I want to synthesize my knowledge of process to pervert some of those stories. I find it limiting to be based in the real. Writers draw from their own experience and take from what they absorb around them, the factual and constructed. I can re-contextualise my work with present information, past recollection, or an imagined future. I'd rather give the sculpture a memory from three different times and push it out into another fiction, or another relationship. I want the work to move through any time quite loosely and freely.
Bronze flower is a she who has witnessed intimate moments and is interested in future encounters.
Courtesy of Sarah Scout Presents
Claire Lambe was born in Macclesfield, UK and lives and works in Melbourne. She received a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, London and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents. At the invitation of Max Delany, ACCA's Artistic Director, and curator Annika Kristensen, Claire was commissioned to make a new body of work, Mother Holding Something Horrific for ACCA's 2017 Influential Australian Artists Series.
Lambe was awarded the Sir Edwards Trust residency at ISCP, New York in 2016 and completed a two-year studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary. This initiated collaboration with Atlanta Eke, Miss Universal, 2015 at Chunky Move and ACCA 2017. Recent exhibitions include The Public Body, Artspace, curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor and Talia Linz (2016); Erewhon, Margaret Lawrence Gallery at the VCA/University of Melbourne, touring to Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Benalla Art Gallery and Latrobe Regional Art Gallery (2016); Neverwhere, Gaia Gallery, Istanbul (2015); Lurid Beauty, National Gallery of Victoria (2015).
Future projects in 2018 include Australia Council, ACME International Residency in London, and inclusion in the TarraWarra Biennial 2018, curated by Emily Cormack.
bronze
45 x 30 x 30 cm
Finalist
Judges of the 2017 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize: Djon Mundine OAM (Curator, Writer, Artist and Activist), Roslyn Oxley OAM (Gallerist and arts benefactor) and Alexie Glass-Kantor (Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney and Curator, Encounters, Art Basel | Hong Kong).
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