Creative Lives: Arabella Plouviez

I attended another creative lives talk recently in which the Dean Arabella Plouviez discussed a range of her photography. I have never taken an active role in learning more about photography but I have always liked it as a medium so it was good to get to hear Arabella talk about the themes and reasons behind some of her projects for a more in depth view.

The first series she talked about was titled 'A Perfect Society' that was based off her personal visits and conversations with women prisoners at Durham Prison which had a women's unit at the time and Plouviez used direct quotes from the women as text on top of her photographs. After the descriptions of these photographs I was surprised to see her use of small toys and stereotypical gendered figurines as the basis for her photographs rather than something like portraiture. At first I was possibly disappointed to not see resemblances of these women she worked directly with but as I viewed more of them I was more and more intrigued and wanted to see her next combination of toy composition and text. I especially liked the one of the witch pictured below as a point without having to be explicitly said about the way these women could be perceived negatively as evil and cruel when nothing is that black and white. I thought it was a clever way of making people think and have some empathy for a group of people they may not think about.

Another series of works discussed was 'Alzheimer's: a quiet story' which was driven by an interest in understanding what scientifically happens to the brain in the case of Alzheimer's and how photography was used as a source of memory in everyday life. These again featured no people, only domestic environments that had a lingering sense of people being a part of them. A favourite of mine was 'Routine' pictured below showing an aged sofa with creases implying wear and tear from a routine of someone always sitting in that exact spot. The subtlety of getting this message across without the need of a person really grasped me as it comes across as really sensitive and gives this whole sense of narrative about a person's life which I like the idea of as I always like works with narratives and stories behind them that I can learn more about.