carole cluer

As we looked at her straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting, and at her blotting pad, her scissors, her thimble, emotion rose up and drowned us. Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more immediately present than in any one of its instants.

Simone de Beauvoir

 Across the world objects frame our lives, invisibly giving it structure and shaping how we interact, defining us, allowing us to celebrate and to grieve, anchoring us to our past.

We imbue them with the ability to comfort and reassure and we use them to traverse time and space to revisit the past or to conjure up the presence of a loved one.

All of us will own something whose value to you far exceeds its material one, your grandfather’s watch, a childhood toy or holiday souvenir.

Would drawing it change it?

What about that thing you have lost, or desired but never possessed, that belonged to another life, would drawing it change your sense of loss.

To have an effect does something have to be true, original, and authentic?

I am giving my imagination and memory a materiality that can then be perceived my others and myself, and can be reviewed. Constructing an alternative future, and past, that is founded on objects yet in which they are removed to reveal my truth.

So much of what is accepted and used as a framework for both our personal lives and our wider society is based on belief, what is accepted as the truth is not some fixed unchanging state rather something that can evolve and change. I want to loosen our ties with reality. It is a subtle untying; I am not a revolutionary, just a relaxing of the joint between fact and fiction to create a fissure that my work can inhabit.

For photographs of my drawings go to the links below

 Drawing Conclusions – My Father

Finding Jonathan

The Archive of Created Histories and Imagined Futures