Claire Rousell
"Give up belonging, that was the only way to free yourself" – Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit
Claire Rousell's work intertwines our collective histories and private memories. In creating images, she combines diverse sources, ranging from official documents such as maps to personal artefacts such as historical photographs from family albums, whilst linking them with hand-made objects which draw the two together. Rousell's work examines how identity and place are related; and how migration and travel between places contributes to our sense of belonging or lack of belonging. Her most recent work queries how we can imaginatively recreate or recapture the past, and our own pasts, through the use of images. Maps, of places in the UK and Rhodesia, provide the 'ground' against which black and white portraits act as the 'figure', to adapt terms from painting. The maps are of locations which the sitters knew: specifically as Rousell notes, "the women sit at the centre of the network of roads and train lines around the town they lived in". The women are carriers of historical narratives, and one map marks out a clear historical breach. It is from the late 1970s, just prior to the beginning of the new nation of Zimbabwe. The effect is encountering the works is akin to being immersed in one of JG Sebald's novels, in which the past is forever set at a distance but where the imperative to 'regain' it is never lost, and indeed is a fundamental part of our mental apparatus. Indeed Rousell's framework is best seen as novelistic: as encompassing diverse characters, settings, and potential narratives, interwoven across generations, the relationships between which are left for us to imaginatively piece together. Two further elements transform the images into three-dimensional objects. Artefacts, like needles, are embedded into the paper, marking out – conceivably – the labour of the figure represented. Moreover, each image is surrounded by embossed paper, which bears the imprint of decorative patterning. This patterning refers to the style in which South African domestic ceilings were once furnished, between the 1890s and 1920s. These patterns, intended to echo European plasterwork of the time and connote high status, were originally constructed from the local material of tin. They embody the idea that our identities are fundamentally relational, hybrid and multiple in nature.
