Ellen Sampson United Kingdom

• 
• 

  Back to profiles Invite to apply

I am an artist and material culture researcher who uses practice-based research to explored the relationships between bodily experience, memory and artefacts, both in museums and archives, and in everyday life. Using film, photography performance work and writing I address the ways that objects can become records of lived experience and how the traces of these experiences can be read.

I am an artist and material culture researcher who uses practice-based research to explored the relationships between bodily experience, memory and artefacts, both in museums and archives, and in everyday life. Using film, photography performance work and writing I address the manner in which material objects can become records of lived experience and how the traces of these experiences can be read or understood by the viewer. Exploring the resonance of worn and used artefacts, I seek to uncover how attachment to the material world is produced and maintained.

My current work ‘The Afterlives of Clothes explores’ the affect of worn and used garments. The project is a call to attend more closely to the materiality of the things we wear and to the ways they age and alter. My methodology uses making close up images as a way of engaging with the intricacies of wear, gesture, and trace. The aim in making these images is to amplify the marks of wear, to make them apparent, and unavoidable for the viewer: to create intimate and enlarged images which highlight these marks in a manner that is affective.

More broadly my work is concerned with, the relationships between the image and artefact, and the differing manifestations of trace, experience and gesture contained within an object and represented in an image. Gesture and experience recorded in/on film is set against the same gestures recorded in material form. The dissonances between these records reveal a spatio-temporal uncertainty, an ambiguity between the ‘here-now’ and ‘there-then’. Viewing artefacts and film together is quite other than viewing them separately. Barthes suggests this meeting creates “a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.” (Barthes, 1977, p.44). This dissonance between ‘the here-now’ and ‘the there-then’, between action performed and the traces left behind, is precisely what I wish to induce in the viewer.

www.ellensampson.com.