Cover Story - Clare Adams

COVER STORY....

CLARE ADAMS

BA HONOURS FINE ART: TIME BASED PRACTICE FIRST CLASS

“Born in Bristol in 1985, I grew up on the Welsh side of the River Severn in the beautiful Wye Valley, living firstly in Shirenewton, then at the age of ten I moved to the nearby town of Chepstow with my Mother and Sister.

My Father, a talented landscape painter inspired me to pursue art from a young age. After leaving school at 18 I took a gap year, to work and travel and have visited France, Spain, Italy, Holland and the Greek Islands exploring their art and culture. At this point in time I fell in love with my best friend, we married and travelled to Thailand.

I began studying for a BA Honours Degree in Fine Art at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in 2004. Here, I became heavily interested in art and its relationship to philosophy; drawing upon personal experiences in human behaviour and family relationships to create work.

After graduating from UWIC in July 2007 with my First Class degree I hope to continue making work as an artist whilst working in the industry harnessing skills learnt in my specialist area of Time Based Practice such as video editing, camera based work or curator and gallery experience.“ LIMITED EDITION

Live Performance/Installation

Light/Sugar/Time/Camera...

“I transformed the installation room into a corridor of light structured by five 1000 watt lights shining through stretched cotton. I covered the floor in bleached white sugar so it was almost ankle deep. I stood at the end of the corridor, naked; my skin saturated with sugar too.”

“The audience was guided from pitch blackness to this blinding corridor and asked, one at a time to remove their shoes and walk into the corridor. They were also given a camera and told they could take a photograph if they chose. As a member of the audience entered I, eyes closed, said,”

“In one minute I will open my eyes and this moment will end.”

“I had been researching the visual coding of advertising and came across the history of the Coca Cola bottle and its iconic curved bottle; its imagery was designed to remind us of the sexual voluptuous woman, yet it’s nevertheless a commodity to be bought and sold. Building hype for a moment that is ultimately disposable.

The idea behind ‘Limited Edition’ was to create a live ‘moment’ between myself and the audience members that would represent the exchange between product and consumer, one and the ‘other’. Sensations of vulnerability and control passed between myself and the individual as, my eyes closed they were able to capture their moment on camera, on opening my eyes after the minute I was able to look them in their eyes, their moment over.

Throughout the three hours the sugar gradually reacted with the heat from the lights and the sweat from my skin and began to melt creating a startling visual effect representing the deterioration of the ideal in the moment. The audiences’ footprints in the sugar left impressions of their movements within the installation, how close they came to my body.

This performance harnessed the cold, revealing methods of advertising to create an opposing sensory intimate encounter between skin and sugar, art and viewer hoping to transcend visual systems through metaphoric exposure.”