Charlotte Victoria Louise Claydon
She/Her
I am a multidisciplinary artist exploring how bodily presence can be suggested through absence, trace, and material residue across sculpture, installation, and photography.
She/Her
Suspended between material and ghost, object and trace.
How can human presence be removed from a space, yet still haunt it?
I investigate what remains when the body is no longer present, where absence becomes a material condition, held in fragile residues and suspended forms.
Photography operates as a primary material within my practice, translating absence through veiled, distorted forms that act as proxies for the body. These works exist in a state of partial visibility, creating an interplay between the seen and unseen, where presence is suggested but never fully revealed. This ambiguity produces a psychological uncertainty, unsettling the boundary between appearance and disappearance, animate and inanimate.
Materials such as plaster and translucent fabric take on a skin-like quality, becoming vessels that carry memory, imprint and indexical trace – a mausoleum of past presence. The repeated use of sheer fabric evokes something fleeting and unstable, where the body is sensed yet obscured, reduced to a ghost-like residue that resists fixed form.
Drawing on frameworks of the uncanny, abjection, hauntology and indexicality, my work constructs spaces where presence lingers. It invites the viewer to question whether the body can ever fully leave a space, or whether it continues to exist as a trace – haunting the threshold between visibility and concealment.
Photography functions as a primary material through which bodily presence is translated rather than recorded. By shifting between high-contrast negatives and warmer, skin-like tones, the work oscillates between the archival and the corporeal. Veiled forms become abstracted and distorted, allowing the body to appear as both residue and apparition—something simultaneously present and withdrawn.
Below are the images used in my degree show.
My sculptural work explores the body as a vessel, reduced to trace, shell or collapse. Through plaster and translucent fabric, materials take on a skin-like quality, holding tension between weight and fragility. These forms exist between containment and release, where the body is no longer visible, yet implied through its absence.
Reclined figure as seen in the degree show, (Modroc, Polyfilla, chiffon fabric and PVA glue)
