Horticulture
Solo Exhibition,
Clare
Charnley Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
1998
CREATIVE CAMERA AUGUST 1998
Clare Charnley's latest body of work (Horticulture
Part 1: Discount Flights, Horticulture Part 2) furthers
an uneasy relationship between the natural and the
cultural, the object and photography. It is as much
a discourse or a series of questions on the ambiguities
of our representations of the world, as it is a meditation
on the conflict between inner and outer meanings,
the invasion of the interior by the wild imaginings
of the beyond. Charnley's images constantly tantalise
representational certainties. The photograph as evidence
is transformed into the site of seductive metaphor.
Neither the photographs nor the objects in the show
respect our expectations, but brim over with additional
meaning, sometimes linguistic, often poetic, playing
on the literal.
 Materials:Lawyers' sealing wax |
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Our expectations are confounded
because, despite the simplicity that is Charnley's
hallmark, many of the pieces here break the traditional
metonymic chain of photographic meaning. Her supplement
of metaphor in the image raises a number of possibilities.
Yet while there are issues raised around 'the chaotic
borderlands of nature and culture, the rational
and irrational' (to quote the press release), Charnley
is not pushing a particular line. She leaves us
to make sense of her stage set. Her own metaphor
for photography is that she has made a body of
work that engages less with the photographic subjects,
more with all the 'paraphernalia' of the studio
set, the use of nature by culture and its constant
re-presentation. And in each work, despite the
recurring motifs of thorns, tears, lead casts and
power cables, there is surprise, as objects pretend
to be other than what they appear either at the
level of surface or the depth of discomfort they
engender in their messages about photographs and
objects.
Graham
Evans is a photographer and
lecturer