REBECCA BOWRING
KNOWING THUNDER GIVES AWAY WHAT LIGHTNING TRIES TO HIDE
LOKL COFFEE CO 10AM - 6PM
When the lockdown began to spread in our consciousness and our lives, I was stunned at the familiarity I felt with this state of separation from friends, family, and life as I knew it. It was as if I had experienced the feeling of it before.
I used the time the lockdown offered to sort through pictures taken a few years earlier with an analogue camera. Looking back, I noticed that they represented both a sense of confinement and a search for escape. I realised that taking these pictures was a way of breathing, a way of detaching myself from impossible situations in order to escape my partner's control.
The pre-existing images surrounding the subject of domestic abuse do not represent what I was experiencing. I didn't identify with the bruises, the broken ribs, the flowing of blood. Through this project, I propose another view on the photographic representation of domestic abuse.
I pasted some of my photos on the walls of my home and photographed them again to visually represent the emotional experience that I had felt. I added other photographs as they were, to create a feeling of uncertainty and to represent the multiple and complex, sometimes contradictory, feelings involved in being confined by a toxic relationship. Loneliness, permanent adaptation, self-effacement, so as not to provoke the thunder that is never far away.
For Rebecca, photography is a durable but fragile medium, at the intersection of our singular and collective existences. By archiving fragments of our daily lives, she is making an attempt to capture our collective memory, transmitting in the process a meta-photographic reflection on the staging of our identities.
In all her work, Rebecca raises the issue of an important paradox of digital society, which gives the image a place that is both colossal and ephemeral. By playing with the medium and its durability, by reworking forgotten clichés or by revisiting outdated genres such as the family portrait, she questions our relationship with time and the materiality of the images - and imprints - that we leave behind.
In her world, photography is a relationship with light and the passing of time, a relationship with oneself and with others, as well as a social or aesthetic gesture charged with meaning.
