Over the last few years, Clare Samuel, an artist based in Tkaronto\/Toronto, has increasingly grappled with her complex relationship with family and kinship, and with Northern Ireland, where she was raised. Her photographs, videos, and installations are intimate and vulnerable. They ask what it means to inherit the weight of blood ties. Oscillating between proximity and distance, her work stays with the trouble, while simultaneously fleeing from it\u200a\u2014\u200aas a survival mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Us (& It) <\/em>(2016 and 2020),she presents portraits of herself and her immediate family set in oval frames. In each, the hand of another family member intrudes into the frame, breaking its edge with an ambiguous gesture inspired by a nineteenth-century clinical psychiatric portrait reproduced in Georges Didi-Huberman\u2019s study of the invention of madness. At once comforting and restraining, the hands knit the sitters together into a family unit: \u201cUs.<\/em>\u201d The overdetermined \u201cit\u201d of Us (& It)<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200athe unnameable other bracketed in her title\u200a\u2014\u200aevokes the mental illness that afflicted her late father, Malcolm, the patterns of behaviour that replicate themselves across generations through genetic markers and social norms, and the fraught social ideals of family. In dialogue with the oval portraits is a silent video of the sea in the coastal town in Northern Ireland where Samuel\u2019s family still lives. Interrupting the cyclical repetition of the waves, her abrupt cuts engender a future in which continuity is severed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Flesh\/Light\/Blood\/Water<\/em>, Samuel interjects her body\u200a\u2014\u200ahair, skin, and hands\u200a\u2014\u200ainto family photographs. The project has taken different forms, including a frieze (2020) and a book (2023) that reflect on the intensity of affect and emotion that accumulates in the body and in images. By reworking these precious childhood photographs, she negotiates the \u201cabsolute distance and totalizing closeness\u201d of familial relations. She reinserts her present self into these images, but their flat surfaces resist her efforts to become kindred<\/em> on her own terms. Samuel\u2019s recent work speaks to us as much of photography\u2019s limits as of the complicated intimacy of belonging that blood ties force upon us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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