The 2017 Christine Risley Award Winner: Clémentine Marie Jeanne Durand-Bedos

Clémentine Marie Jeanne Durand-Bedos

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.