She never speaks about herself, she could be anything.

Claire LAMBE

Registration Number	1206-1-2
Maker	Claire LAMBE
Type of Object	Photograph
Tags	Darebin Art Prize Accession
Medium	Photograph, Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP; Isolation Sound Absorber
Collection	Darebin Art Collection
Height	120.00cm
Width	66.00cm
Where Made	Australia
When Made	2017

Public Description:

Lambe’s work 'She never speaks about herself, she could be anything.' was the recepient of the 2017 Darebin Art Prize. Lambe was awarded the prize by a judging panel that included Professor of Art and Performance at Deakin University, David Cross; artist Lou Hubbard and Curator of Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Claire Watson.

Cross said of Lambe’s photograph, “The winning work demonstrates an extraordinary acuity, a stunning economy of image, text, materiality and concept. It evokes a quiet but sustained resonance and captures an illusion of visual complexity and haptic experience.”

Claire Lambe completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Bristol College of Art in 1985, followed by postgraduate studies at the University of New South Wales in 1990 and a Master of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 1995. . At the invitation of Max Delany, ACCA’s Artistic Director and curator Annika Kristenson, Claire was commissioned to make a new body of work, Mother Holding Something Horrific for ACCA’s 2017 Influential Australian Artists Series and her Recent exhibitions include Miss Universal (with Atlanta Eke), Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2015; Strangefellows (with Lisa Young) West Space, Melbourne, 2013; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013–14. In 2016 Lambe was awarded the Sir Edwards Trust residency in New York.

Makers Statement:

’Fantasy is about dreams, desire, unreality and the unconscious, whilst ethnography is about human behavior in real social situations. Is that a helpful reading for your own work – a mixture of fantasy and ethnography?’’ Max Delany I re-stage remembered experiences, not necessarily to understand them, but remake them. I can tell a lie. I don’t have to be truthful. What happens with hindsight and experience is that you learn the layered outcomes of certain situations, so you can’t place yourself in those circumstances anymore. Memory conditions every action in the present. I want to synthesize my knowledge of process to distort some of those stories, to push them. I find it limiting to be based in the real. Writers draw from personal experience and take from what they absorb around them, the factual and constructed. I can re-contextualize my work with present information, past recollection, or an imagined future.