honorable mention
paula rae gibson united kingdom
title
hear it in my spirit
it feels like now more than ever, we have to dig deep and go with who we really are and not be taken by the tide of chaos around us.
i wanted to make portraits that remind us of our power, the beauty of being real, and vulnerable.
To describe Paula Rae Gibson’s work as imperfect would be to engage in gross understatement, and to entirely miss the point of why she makes her photographs. Her images are more than altered, they are distressed. Their surfaces have been marred and abraded. Whatever markers of perfection her subjects may have originally possessed have been written over by a seeming obsession with erasure and cancellation. These are anxious images, injured objects.The work is also riveting, stunning really, in its vulnerability, violent tenderness, and naked heartbreak. It’s catalyst was the untimely cancer diagnosis and eventual death of Gibson’s husband. This when their daughter was only 20 months old.
What tongue does trauma speak? What is the antidote for this level of loss? Gibson’s images are not palliative, they do not soothe, salve, relieve, or release. Instead, they capture the visceral anguish of loss, inscribed in a grammar where all nouns are objects of desire, and all verbs are executed as energy on the surface, in unrelenting signals of grief.
Gibson uses the female body – most often her own – as a private language that is autobiographical and confessional. We are invited into a personal landscape where bodies and gestures are supercharged with meaning and significance, and offered a glimpse of a privileged vocabulary – an emotional shorthand, a somatic sign language.
These images don’t feel like photographs, because details and specifics have melted and dissolved. They are images on the verge of self immolation, ablaze with raw emotion, where the photographic surface functions as a metaphorical second skin, making visible the wounds
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entry description
HEAR IT IN MY SPIRITit feels like now more than ever, we have to dig deep and go with who we really are and not be taken by the tide of chaos around us.
i wanted to make portraits that remind us of our power, the beauty of being real, and vulnerable.
about the photographer
In repairing the object you really end up loving it more, because you now know its eagerness to be reassembled, and in running a fingertip over its surface you alone can feel its many cracks. ― Nicholson BakerTo describe Paula Rae Gibson’s work as imperfect would be to engage in gross understatement, and to entirely miss the point of why she makes her photographs. Her images are more than altered, they are distressed. Their surfaces have been marred and abraded. Whatever markers of perfection her subjects may have originally possessed have been written over by a seeming obsession with erasure and cancellation. These are anxious images, injured objects.The work is also riveting, stunning really, in its vulnerability, violent tenderness, and naked heartbreak. It’s catalyst was the untimely cancer diagnosis and eventual death of Gibson’s husband. This when their daughter was only 20 months old.
What tongue does trauma speak? What is the antidote for this level of loss? Gibson’s images are not palliative, they do not soothe, salve, relieve, or release. Instead, they capture the visceral anguish of loss, inscribed in a grammar where all nouns are objects of desire, and all verbs are executed as energy on the surface, in unrelenting signals of grief.
Gibson uses the female body – most often her own – as a private language that is autobiographical and confessional. We are invited into a personal landscape where bodies and gestures are supercharged with meaning and significance, and offered a glimpse of a privileged vocabulary – an emotional shorthand, a somatic sign language.
These images don’t feel like photographs, because details and specifics have melted and dissolved. They are images on the verge of self immolation, ablaze with raw emotion, where the photographic surface functions as a metaphorical second skin, making visible the wounds
back to gallery