Creative Lives Talk: Arabella Plouviez and John Harrison

This was the first Creative Lives talk that I've attended, it featured the works of John Harrison and Arabella Plouviez.

The talk started with Plouviez talking about her "A Perfect Society" work, a series of 15 photographs which explores the theme of the importance of image and photographic identification within surveillance systems. The work involved Plouviez having conversations with the inmates of Durham prison, from these conversations she created a narrative which featured quotes from the conversations that she had with the inmates, allowing her to tell a story about their personal experiences of being inside the prison. For the privacy of the inmates that she had the conversations with, she changed all the names of the inmates.

The images that she created would have the text across the image along with the figurines that she used to enhance the narrative.

The next series of work that she talked about were titled "Alzheimers: a quiet story", this particular series centred around the idea of understanding what happened to the brain when Alzheimers is developed and how photography was being used a source of memory for everyday life. The works were absent of people, a theme shared with the previous series of work mentioned. However, the images were of domestic, everyday enviroments where people had once been, a representation of losing that person. One particular image that I liked was called "Routine", it showed an old, aging sofa with a rumpled seat, implying someone always sat there. I liked the sensitivity of the image, of converying the message of the work without explicitly stating it.