About
‘It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality’
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)
My work engages the relationship between our interior and exterior worlds and the poetics of the everyday, often drawing on the residual or trace. In our fast-paced lives, things can become dislocated, overlooked or awkward, and my work attempts to convey this feeling through evoking both a distance and sense of empathy to my subject matter.
A reading of place and self can be interpreted from the imprints we leave behind and how we project ourselves onto our material world. In so doing, the work considers the ways we (un)knowingly assimilate, appropriate or reject societal ideologies. In an attempt to reflect on what is revealed, the work questions what could or might have been. It examines the ruptured, the broken and the liminal; and offers a dual reading; a new utopia born out of disillusionment.
Whilst immersed in the subject matter, I metaphorically remove myself from it, where I am better able to interpret the urban and rural landscapes depicted. It is in instinctively photographing the empty space, in-between the action and landscapes devoid of people, that I look to create a sense of event. I am drawn to the contradictory and uncanny aspects that life can sometimes conjure up and the way in which they manifest. Here, the work seeks to explore the juxtapositions between the aspirational versus reality and the incidental and the contrived in our daily lives.
It is in the complexity of our interwoven layers of personal and collective histories, that issues of fragility, loss, memory, perception and temporality can be observed. However, it is in transcending specificity that we can sometimes find solace; a richness of experience where new narratives form. I sequence my photography with painting, collage and installation elements._ _ _
Rachel Wilberforce has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including Tate Modern, Freud Museum, Open Eye Gallery, Courtauld Institute of Art, Leeds Art Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), BFI Southbank, Stanley Picker Gallery, Van Abbemuseum and Ron Mandos. Her work is part of Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Chaos Gallery and National Museums Liverpool collections. She spent her formative years in Cape Town, South Africa and currently lives and works in London and Norfolk.Wilberforce is an AIR (Artists’ Interaction & Representation) Council Member (inaugurated January 2011). She was shortlisted for The Salon Photography Prize (2011) and awarded the Rector’s Scholarship for MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design (2012/13).
To make contact please email me at rachel@rachelwilberforce.com.