Alumni Claire Lambe was born in Macclesfield, UK and is currently based in Melbourne. She received a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, London and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents. Lambe was a Gertrude Studio Artist between 2014 and 2016, a residency which saw the beginning of a collaboration with contemporary dancer and choreographer Atlanta Elke, with whom Lambe worked with on Miss Universal, 2015 at Chunky Move and on Mother Holding Something Horrific, 2017 at ACCA.
Lambe’s practice engages sculpture in all its material and transformative glory and potential, to explore gender, class and identity. Her work is deeply personal, laden with subjective and popular culture references to a past, characterised by the violence and sexual promiscuity of 1970s Northern England. Lambe's current exhibition Mother Holding Something Horrific, is an amalgamation of sculpture, installation and collaborative performance with Atlanta Elke, explorative of the fine, sometimes blurred line between memory and experience, reality and re-enactment.
Mother Holding Something Horrific, curated by Max Delany and Annika Kristensen, runs until 25 June at ACCA. We interviewed Lambe about this exhibition, her time at Gertrude, and what inspires her.
Gertrude: Last year was your final year as a resident of the Gertrude Studios. Can you tell us about your Gertrude experience, how it impacted you?
Claire Lambe: It changed my thinking, working side by side with an amazing community, the workhorse downstairs, my fellow inmates, watching how it all works, how we behave together as individuals.
Pip Wallis, before she left, curated a show placing Atlanta Eke and myself together. Pip saw something I didn’t and that is so generous. Collaboration is very difficult and at Gertrude I was allowed to make mistakes and was supported in that.
I found the curators visits very difficult, how to language the work. I learnt not to perform to the contemporary themes of that time, and not to worry about being excluded.
Your work is inherently female – imbued with female form, sexuality and vulnerability. Does this stem from your placement of yourself at the centre of your work?
Yes I am female, yes I am her, but it’s more about my memory of a past or how I interoperate experience. Where is now and what is the future. This is less restrictive; I am not stuck in ‘she’ or ‘here’. I can fiction the past and re-image what’s potentially in front.
How do you balance the dichotomy of repulsion and attraction, present in your work?
I don’t know what I find attractive anymore, certainly not traditional beauty or youth.
On the other hand decay and death is repulsive. There is no balance, no understanding of the other.
Mother Holding Something Horrific, running until June 25 at ACCA, is a no holds barred insight in to the human condition: gender, sexuality, identity and class. What inspired such an honest questioning of what it means to be human?
Honesty mmm honesty is overrated, honesty can be cruel. I’d like to be crueller in the work, find a fictional space where I can pull out the more horrific elements of the human condition.
Can you elaborate on the idea of ‘the artwork as witness?’ How does this feature inMother Holding Something Horrific?
Ma femme au chat ouvert, 2017, was initiated from a past experience of hostessing in Japan in 1987. If you worked in a club longer than 3 months the customers would expect more than verbal communication, so you moved clubs. Apart from the formal structure of hostessing ie; company for a guest, there was another world you could be drawn into, for example paid sex, and the paid watching of sex. I drew a line in the sand, not morally, but for self-preservation, what were your limits, personally.
If I sent the sculpture into that situation, that I didn’t personally go, for example being paid to watch sex, does that still feel as if I have crossed my line of self-preservation or have I become the client? How is it possible to extract that experience, that feeling?
If I stage the exercise it becomes, stylised not true. If I inserted the form into a real situation, I would also become complicit.
It could just exist as an action, that the sculpture has witnessed sex, not porn.
It could witness sexual encounters or intimate moments. Most objects have witnessed intimate moments, and can be taken with you throughout your life.
Architecture and place tend to stay put.
Object as witness. Think of all those objects in hotels, clubs bars. etc.
Why the outrage when historical monuments are destroyed? Should these objects witness more?
Your work is broadly influenced – from Thatcher era, British classism, through Freudian psychoanalysis and French theory on mis-en-scene – what’re you reading or researching at the minute?
Thatcher, I hated her so much, it’s that hate that I make work from, not her. Sorry, still get riled up at the very thought.
Gaudi, Alien vs Predator and British Folk music.
