Clare Strand

essay commissioned by John Gill for the South East Arts by Stephen Bull

Clare Strand, a young Brighton based artist and graduate of the Royal College of art, has already published and exhibited her photography widely across Europe. In the last six years she has produced an impressive body of work, each series of which seems to represent a different stage of life. In Strand's 1996 series Cap in Hand we gaze at the stoic faces of charity boxes moulded into the shape of disabled children. Once a common sight on the street these figures are now disappearing from view. Smartly dressed in brightly painted ties and jumpers, they are like no child we have ever seen before. In close-up portraits these immobile noble victims return our look sightlessly. Strand's two-part Ôspots-and-all' portraits of teenage girls stand awkwardly against a red backdrop. Their stiff poses suggest the unease of a difficult age, where the presentation of the self becomes all important. The other five pictures show the members of a staggeringly young Spice Girls tribute band. While younger, these girls fill the frame more confidently;perhaps because they are imagining(as well as imaging) themselves as their idols.

In a recent series Wasted (1999) male and female figures having survived beyond their teenage years, appear desperate and isolated in public spaces. A man lies prostrate on the pavement outside a garishly lit amusement arcade. His unseen face replaced by the ghostly screaming visages floating above his head, that act as prizes in an arcade machine. In another photograph , a woman stands still on an elevated roadway surrounded by the black of the night. The arrows on the road point the opposite way. She seems lost and directionless.
A similar theme emerges from in the Middle of Nowhere. In this series Strand photographs middle-aged men in a singles bar. Alone in a crowd they attempt to act casual yet remain trapped within the carapace of their formal attire. Spontaneity is a struggle with your tie tucked into your trousers. these men seem to have hit the mid-life crisis that the figures in Wasted are headed for.

Finally Strand's first published work The Mortuary (1994) confronts us with what we might try to put to the back of our mind; the banal reality of death. These close ups of the tools and objects of the post mortem, such as a blood drain from the mortuary table, are partially out-of -focus perhaps reflecting both our curiosity to look and our wish not to see. In a more humorous moment Strand has photographed a blue bin filled with shredded tax bills used to fill body cavities. Only two things in life are certain, death and taxes. Each series that Clare Strand produces sheds a fascinating light on her previous work. There is a dark undercurrent to all her imagery , which begins to seep into her most recent pictures, almost filling the frame with blackness. Perhaps it is not surprising to learn that Strand plans to make her next series in black and white.
 

Stephen Bull Brighton July 2000.
 
 
Stephen Bull is a writer, artist and lecturer at Northbrook College, Worthing and Portsmouth University.