Through the lens of motherhood, Our Wider Flesh (2024) articulates ideas about bodies and land, maternal ancestry and the enclosure acts preceding the Industrial Revolution which enabled capitalism in Europe to spread across the world. Set around a building site in a field across from my terraced house in the semi-rural, post-industrial village of Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, an a capella composition emerges from responding to the sounds of machinery as the landscape is carved up and turned into future homes. Footage of moving through this landscape is thrown onto paper using a faulty projector that is in the process of breaking down, metamorphosing and composting the imagery as it moves across the surface. My seven year old daughter is projected dancing around the arches of the Victorian viaduct next to their home, weaving her body into the spaces, mirroring and reifying the sensory exchange that might have existed before people were separated from their land by the centuries of capitalism. This separation can be witnessed and experienced as the dualisms of nature and culture manifest within the landscape and ecological crisis that is unfolding throughout the current epoch of time known as the Anthropocene. 

Our Wider Flesh (2024)

Accompanying text for Our Wider Flesh (2024)

Monsterland (2023) is a video made in response to a key question motivating my practice-based PhD project: what does it mean to mother in an age of ecological crisis? How is the Anthropocene shaping motherhood, and how is motherhood shaping the landscapes of the Anthropocene? For if the Anthropocene is an era defined by humans becoming a geological force throughout the world, and the womb is our first environment, we might also think of maternal agency as a generative force within this unfolding and uncertain terrain, entangled in the complexities that constitute these new - albeit potentially unhealthy and unsustainable - ecologies. The video merges the plastic world of 'softplay' - children's indoor recreational spaces - with the trauma-layered landscape of post-industrial West Yorkshire, converging ideas and ways of dwelling and nurturing in the Anthropocene.

Monsterland (2023)

Accompanying pamphlet for Monsterland (front)

Accompanying pamphlet for

Monsterland (back)

Monsterland incorporated into the Maternal Stratum exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield, July 2023.

Part of the Sobremesa exhibition, the video Kitchen Memory Gyre (2022) is a collection of encounters on the island of Lanzarote, projected from the dining table in my kitchen onto maruishi paper, hanging from a creel where I dry my family’s clothes. The projection was filmed and then re-projected onto the paper repeatedly, so the light within the space of the kitchen eroded the image until it was no longer recognisable. The music - a utopian love song to my daughter - was performed in the same way, with the voice and synth projected and recorded to capture the ambience of the kitchen, until the sounds finally became too distorted to recognise the song. This took 12 rounds of projections and recordings. All these captures were then recomposed to create a new landscape/journey made out of the erosions and sedimentations of the kitchen environment and the process of performing and recording the memory embedded within it.

Kitchen Memory Gyre (2022)

Accompanying text to Kitchen Memory Gyre (2022)

© Clare Carter
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