Clare Bottomley
Biography
Clare Bottomley is an artist, educator, and early-career researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. She is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University, exploring re-enactment as a creative method for re-examining past representations in photography, research, and Artistic Research. She also lectures at Falmouth University, UK, within the Institute of Photography. Her work has been exhibited across the UK and internationally, including the Harvard Gallery touring exhibition Act of Creation: Art and Motherhood, currently on display at Dundee Contemporary Arts, UK.
Defeated Gladiator -/- Nadja
Artist: Clare Bottomley
From: you don't have to emerge from nothing, 2024
Dimensions: 95 × 55 × 55 cm
Materials: LED monitor, polycarbonate
The Dying Gladiator, You Don’t Have to Emerge from Nothing
2024
95cm x 55cm x 60cm
Holographic Screen and LED Screen
Made in Collaboration with Nadja Leham
My research titled: Artistic Re-Enactment: Returning the Past to Critique the Present and Re-imagine the future, focuses on the artistic of re-enactment as a method to creatively re-examining of past representation. Non-normative-identifying photographers, including myself, have adopted this method of visually remixing past representations with present selves to explore how historical imagery impact contemporary identity from alternative, previously marginalised perspectives.
In You Don’t Have to Emerge from Nothing, I collaborated with my queer friends to re-enact classical sculptures through photogrammetry, creating 3D scans, seeking to reimagine these works, which are at the core of Western representational norms, through a post-normal lens.
The reinterpreted sculptures are presented as holograms to support the re-enactments intertwining temporal spaces. The hologram itself embodies a paradoxical presence—both here and not quite, like a lingering memory suspended in ephemerality, pointing toward sci-fi futures yet to be realized
