Clare Bottomley
The Birth of the Image (working title), made in collaboration with Hermione Wiltshire, is a series of six photographs that restage iconic Judeo-Christian scenes from classical paintings showing the Nativity, the Annunciation or apostolic teaching. The images take these well-known tropes as starting points and use the contemporary vernacular of the photographic studio to reimagine them, while placing women characters at their centre. Each central character is modelled by a high-profile contemporary practitioner or academic whose work is linked to the subject of the scene.
The series seeks to rewrite the narrative conventions which relegate women characters in paintings to subservient roles, repositioning them instead as speaking subjects, professionals and teachers. Instead of serving as adjuncts to the conventional male protagonists, the women become central figures in each scene, with their own legacies to behold. They become responsible, for instance, for the transfer of knowledge (aka the word of God), as seen in the figure of St Anne. In the photograph St Anne is modelled by Dr Hilary Robinson, who is Professor of Feminism, Art and Theory at the University of Loughborough. In The Annunciation, the role of Angel Gabriel is played by Dr Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, who researches reproduction, diagnostics and cinema at the University of Strathclyde.
Clare Bottomley’s practice is built upon collaboration and research encompassing photography, video, animation and participatory workshops. It investigates the individual’s autonomy in the act of looking, as a challenge to the established authority of visuality, and is set against the current essentialist forms of representation that prevail in visual culture, advocating for a more subjective and anti-essentialist viewpoint. Having completed undergraduate studies in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, Bottomley went on to study an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. She is a recipient of the Deutsche Bank Fine Art Award for her collaborative project, Everybody Says It’s All in Your Head 2016, which went on to be screened in film festivals internationally.