An Interview with Claire Ringrose:
How is preparation for the degree show going?
So far I’ve found a couple of sponsors and helped with several bake sales at university. I’m mainly involved in fundraising and finding sponsorship for the show.
What are you currently working on?
The concept for my work is a mixture of mythology, anthropology, prehistory and fantasy. At the moment I’ve got a series of immersive photographs, all of objects within or on the surface of water, which are highly ambiguous and perhaps even unsettling. These photographs take us to a state of mind, hopefully bridging a link to our primal selves.
I’m researching into displaying these photographs to fit the ideas of the project and the objects that go with them. My starting point was imagining objects cast off from the river, and the objects, these tools I’ve made, remind me of figures, members of an imagined community living alongside the river.
I will be making more objects, just to see what comes up. I’m still trying to figure out whether to take an artisan or bricoleur approach to the objects.
What are you thinking about presenting in the final show?
I’m working on producing an installation, using wall and floor, and both the photographs and the objects.
I want the objects to be leaning against the wall, which implies a latency, an action waiting to happen, objects that perhaps have the power to be used in some kind of ritual. I also might include a vitrine of smaller objects.
What problems have you encountered in the working process?
Well I’ve been examining my work really closely, why I am doing what. I want to be unencumbered by debates on form and surface, it’s just not an issue in the way I want to work. I trust my own eye and hand, I want the work to be driven by instinct rather than theory or aesthetics.
