top of page

CHRISTINE RISLEY AWARD WINNER 2017

CONTAGIOUS HYSTORIES-extended

@Constance Howard Gallery & Goldsmiths Textile Collection

@Khôra

28 SEPT 2017- 8 DED 2017

The Christine Risley Award is a cash prize awarded by the Goldsmiths Textile Collection & Constance Howard Gallery to a graduating Goldsmiths student for outstanding work relating to textiles, in memory of Christine Risley.

 

 

The Goldsmiths Textile Collection and Constance Howard Gallery is delighted to announce that the winner of the Christine Risley Award 2017 is BA (Hons) Fine Art graduate Clémentine Marie Jeanne Durand-Bedos.

The judging panel unanimously agreed on the strength of her work, Contagious Hystories, which, very sensitively dealt with ideas around the divided self, drawing upon the relationship between textile and the body to physically and spatially describe the emergence of two separate identities from a whole, through a 1.5 hour performance. Utilising digital, and screen printing in combination with cyanotype processes, the hand-made garments, which draw on personal, family and cultural histories, embody this metamorphosis.

In the words of guest judge Professor Lesley Millar MBE:

[the] ‘use of cloth and textile thinking … both illustrates and embodies her theme. Her personal history is embedded in the dyed and patterned cloth and clothing which she uses to interrogate place and identity. The work generates a sense of completeness, as the relationships between body, cloth and viewer are explored through the intimate touch of the textile. It is an exceptional artwork’.

The performance boldly demarcates its site, held in an autonomous temporary structure on ‘disused’ land in New Cross, from which travellers were recently evicted, and live streamed at Goldsmiths for the Degree Show. Asking the audience to climb over a wall into this confined space, requires them to enact a sense of displacement. Through the intimacy of the performative experience, the artist creates communities of inclusion through place.

Photos by Laura Minet & Elise Guillaume

Contagious Hystories is a sprawling artwork with a mirrored structure. Rooted both inside and outside of institutions, the viewer has to navigate in between. The hour and a half performance originally took place in Khôra, our relocated studio transformed into an outsider gallery on disused land near New Cross Gate station and was live streamed to the top floor of the Ben Pimlott Building at Goldsmiths College.

Upon receiving the Christine Risley Award by Goldsmiths Textile Collections, I have been given the opportunity to revisit the work, to reexplore its sources and extend its ramifications, for a three month exhibition in the Constance Howard Gallery. The show presents handmade silk garments patterned through photographic printing processes, a livestream and materials documenting the hour and a half performance ~ reflecting on what is passed down between generations and articulating relations between personal hystories and madness of gentrification. 

In Khôra, the poetry of Shakil A. I. Dawood meets the drawings of my grandmother Jeanne Durand. Together they speak about love, their purveyor's flowers, and their experiences of schizophrenia. On the opening night, the audience was invited to plant with us the seeds of edible flowers, dyes, aphrodisiacs and medicinal herbs.

Photos by Laura Minet

All site contents © Clémentine Bedos
bottom of page