Fresh Milk is excited to welcome our first resident artists for 2016, Helen Cammock and Emma Critchley, who will be travelling from London to be in residence with us between February 1 – 26.
Helen, who is of British and Caribbean descent, works with video, photography, installation and text to consider how individual and collective experiences expose structural inequality through exploring the politics of society and visual, spoken and written language and of representation. Her planned project under the working title Myth, Lie and Omission will explore the ‘inopportunity’ of acknowledgement, hidden achievements and perceptions of worth, aspiration and value, particularly as they relate to race and gender, science and invention.
Emma’s practice is rooted in the underwater environment. She is particularly interested in the way sound is perceived beneath the water’s surface, and how this affects our relationship to our surroundings. She will use the residency to explore these concepts and the idea of echolocation as a way of using sound to explore the rich natural environments that Barbados has to offer. By working with a variety of underwater locations, very different to everyday experiences, and placing them within more familiar spaces, she hopes to question notions about the role of the acoustic landscape and our perception and relationship to the spaces around us.
Helen and Emma are taking this opportunity to continue dialogues that they have already begun about filmmaking. Both their concerns and work are very different, but they see a real value in some of the conversations that have emerged, and view this residency as a prime chance for a peer development discourse that is already proving productive for both of them to further evolve.
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About Helen Cammock:
Helen Cammock graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2011. Her work spans photography, video, poetry, printmaking and installation.
Helen says about her work: Using installation, video, photography and text, my practice considers how individual and collective experience exposes structural inequality through exploring the politics of society, of visual, spoken and written language and of representation. I often use archival material and historical points/events that are connected to my subject position. I am invested in the relationship between the individual lived experience and the connection to the wider post colonial context. In constructing narratives that in general pivot around historical or contemporary events the viewer might recognise particular dates, events and speeches, but they are woven into a narrated if fragmented story. I am interested in the idea of authorship – and something I call ‘the audible fingerprint’. I will always be drawn to the question – Who represents whom, and for whom?
Recent screenings and exhibitions include: Hmn4, London, 2016, Carte de Visite, Hollybush Gardens, London, Dec’15-Jan‘16 Transform, Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme, Tate Britain, 2015, Changing Room, in Common Place, Brighton Photo Fringe, 2014, Scene, Pitzhanger Manor Gallery, London, 2014 You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows, Hollybush Gardens, 2014, Reach out and Touch Me, Hollybush Gardens, London,2013, London Art Now, curated by Armesden, Lodge Park National Trust, 2013 Oriel Davis Open, selectors Ben Borthwick & Ann Jones.
Her writing has appeared on photoworks.org.uk and Aperture Magazine and she was shortlisted for the Bridport poetry prize in 2015. Helen was Co-Director of Brighton Photo Fringe 2008-12 has has run projects for The Photographers Gallery, London, Open School East, London, Photoworks, London and PhotoVoice, London.
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About Emma Critchley:
Emma Critchley has worked as an underwater image-maker for over ten years. In 2011 she graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art. Through working with a combination of photography, video and installation she explores the human relationship with the underwater environment. Emma has developed works funded by The National Media Museum, The Photographers Gallery, The Arts Council England, The British Council, the Singapore International Foundation and INTERREG IVC (financed by the European Regional Development Fund). Awards include the Royal College of Art Sustain ‘Moving Minds’ award, winner of the British Underwater Image Festival, finalists in the Saatchi Gallery & Channel 4’s New Sensations, the Saatchi Gallery & Google’s Motion Photography Prize and most recently the Firtish Foundation & Saatchi Gallery’s UK/RAINE award. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Australian Centre of Photography, the ICA Singapore, Gerhard Marcks Haus Germany, The National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers Gallery and the Royal Academy.