Claire
I think we should try to plant wild flowers in the garden
Maybe witchy movies and crochet is also on the cards
Could you do my hair please?
Claire
Tea?
I’m bringing home a kitten foetus in a jar
Can I bring home a cat for the weekend I promise I’ll bring her back into work on Monday
I get paid next Wednesday and I’m going to get the rug cleaned
Are you home?
2022
The series, Claire, offers a fragmented narration of life with my best friend in our shared home.
A mix of documentary and personal research into the nature of connection and platonic love, it is the intimate every day of living with someone that my photographs seek—looking for the emotive in ordinary scenes by featuring our lived space and bodily presence in close view. I have tried to capture personal history in real-time, creating a container for sentiment to give our relationship a presence after its physical absence. As autobiography ultimately replaces actual living for those in the photographs. Claire also explores the complexities of the documentary photographic enterprise; the photographer-as-unbiased-witness is acknowledged as a relative impossibility; the relationship between photographer and subject is the foundation and foreground of the work; their natural interactions dictate the suite. From the dark tones of the selected images emerge pops of yellow, the colour synonym of friendship. Each image’s title comes from text messages I received from Claire. Today will be gone, and memories can blur, but photographs continue to exist.
With thanks to Claire McGuinness.