Echoes - Experiments by Zara Carpenter at Rochester Art Gallery

For the last two years Zara Carpenter has been examining her experience of past trauma and how its echoes have come to manifest themselves as physical pain

Zara takes photographs of her body using analogue cameras. She then experiments using different materials and techniques to disrupt the image and its chemistry; damaging the emulsion to create abstractions. Only ghosts remain of what would have been. The experimental, destructive process is initiated by hand, yet the results are beyond human control. By submitting to chaos Zara becomes free from constraints; by harnessing mistakes she has found a place where control and chance collide. 

Images of her body metamorphose into landscapes, coastlines, weather fronts, fossils dug from the earth, or distant nebulae. The act of creating these images has allowed Zara to process and understand her past, to sit with it, bring it to the surface and exorcise it from her into the images she makes. An act of catharsis. An act of healing. 

Zara Carpenter is a self-taught multi disciplinary artist. In 2017 Zara co-founded the ACE-funded arts project SICK! Living With Invisible Illness. 

To accompany the exhibition, essays have been written by online curator and writer Stephen Ellcock and Dr Nick Fallon, a neuroscientist, pain researcher and lecturer at the University of Liverpool. These will be available online and to pick up in the gallery. 

This work in this exhibition has been created with the support of Arts Council England, Developing Your Creative Practice Grant. 

Installation of the large wall piece was kindly supported by Westbury Signs.

WHERE: Rochester Art Gallery

WHEN: 17 Jan - 28 Mar 2020

INFO: Meet Zara at a preview evening on Thu, 16 Jan, 6.30-8.30pm. Free.

WEB: medway.go.uk/arts