Us (& It)
Clare Samuel

‘I have a complex relationship with my family and with Northern Ireland, where I grew up—it feels governed by a tension between distance and closeness. We think of our self as separate from our surroundings and other people, but blood relatives unsettle this autonomy, sharing our DNA, and knowing us in a particularly deep way. This entanglement may be grounding and supportive, but when you inherit things like mental illness, this intimacy can instead be painful. Photographs of my childhood have a magical quality for me. The bodies they depict are precious and fragile. But the flat closed surfaces of the prints are at odds with that. I find myself wanting to give that fleshy life back to them, to reinscribe images of the person I was then with who and where I am now. To press together that absolute distance and that totalising closeness.’ – Clare Samuel ¹

Clare Samuel is an artist originally from Portstewart in Co. Derry, she has lived in Canada for the last six years and is now working between there and the UK. She began her studies at Napier University in Edinburgh, completing the Photography BFA with honours at Ryerson University, Toronto and recently an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal. She has participated in exhibitions and artist residencies in Europe and North America. She is the recipient of various awards including the Roloff Beny Foundation Fellowship in Photography in 2008. Her work had been published in several magazines including Next Level and the current issue of Prefix Photo. She tends to work with themes of borders; between people, places or states of being, and the role of representation in these constructions. ²

TLP Editions are an ongoing collection of contemporary photographic projects in the form of accessible and inexpensive publications by PhotoIreland. These A5 sized booklets present a standard format throughout the series, with 36 pages each, a cover with a text block of under 140 words that introduces the project, and the title and the artist name only available on the contra cover. The project creates a node of opportunities as it allows photographers to enter the publishing arena, while facilitating access to contemporary artistic practices to the general public.³

Founded in 2009, PhotoIreland was conceived as an organisation to stimulate a dialogue around photography in Ireland by developing a varied array of initiatives and events with a strong participative approach. ⁴