“the way children negotiate their surroundings and respond with an unharnessed spatial awareness, which I find really interesting when applied to the adult body.”
“… each living body is space and has space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space.”
These photographs form part of an ongoing series of engagements with institutional space and architecture. Through my photographic performances I investigate specific gestures and movements undertaken within public and private spaces, considering the impacts on the body by educational and institutional authority. The photographic process of recording the body in space depicts my physical and experiential memory of these sites, which is often absurd or uncomfortable.
My practice at large is informed by feminist theory and considers the implications of representing a woman’s body (my own) in an inherently fetishizing medium. My aim with all my photographs is to subvert the dominant ways we depict women’s subjectivity.
This series was captured in various spaces at RMIT University (life drawing studio, court room, design archive), an institution I have engaged with as a photography student and now lecturer. It is also where my late father studied architecture in the 1950s, which prompted my thinking when making this work about our personal connections to these educational spaces over time. -Clare Ray.
The common theme shown in these specific images are that only her legs and body are visible, her face is hidden and mainly focals the legs which is representing how women’s bodies get fetishized.
In these photographs action is opposed with stillness, danger opposed with suspension; the boundaries of space, both of the body and the environment, the interior and the exterior, memory and dream, are changed.
