Join us for the opening night of ‘Echoes’
16th January 6.30-8.30pm Rochester Art Gallery
‘For the last two years Zara Carpenter has been examining her experience of past trauma and how its echoes have come to manifest themselves as physical pain.
Zara takes photographs of her body using analogue cameras. She then experiments using different materials and techniques to disrupt the image and its chemistry; damaging the emulsion to create strange abstractions. Only ghosts remain of what would have been. The experimental, destructive process is initiated by hand, yet the results are beyond human control. By submitting to chaos Zara becomes free from constraints; by harnessing mistakes she has found a place where control and chance collide.
Images of her body metamorphose into the universal: landscapes, coastlines, weather fronts, fossils dug from the earth, or distant nebulae. The act of creating these images has allowed Zara to process and understand her past, to sit with it, bring it to the surface and exorcise it from her into the images she makes. An act of catharsis. An act of healing.’