Clémentine Bedos: JUDGES PICK

Clémentine Marie Jeanne Durand-Bedos is a trans disciplinary artist based in London. Through a process-based craft and site-specific performance practice, she explores histories & genealogies to unsettle the past and re-animate the institutions that are embedded and that continue to resonate in the present.

« My grandmother the ‘outsider’ Jeanne Durand has spent most of her life behind walls, drawing the flowers that with my young mother they used to sell in the streets
and the Virgins protecting them. Physically distant but connected through care, Jeanne is manifesting and spreading her love through the reproduction of its purveyors. Relentlessly tracing and retracing the lines that hold our family together.
Digging into her extensive art collection and the limited photographic documentation of her life, I have been processing and patching up my legacy, rehabilitating my hystory. »

Original: Photomontage: photograph of my grand- mother overlayed with one of her felt-tip pens drawing.

Image selected by Victoria Cooke.
Gallery Director, Gallery1957, Ghana
One of 5 judges of this years competition

“There is something incredibly comforting about this work. As we all spend more time at home, the act of a mothers embrace seems more symbolic than ever before. This work not only explores Bedos’s personal cultural histories through process-based craft but shows us a nostalgic time capsule of childhood, some how both touching and heartbreaking all at once.”