Elemental - Limited Edition of 10 Photograph

Claire Gill’s artwork encompasses a collection of limited edition seascape and landscape prints. These are peaceful, poetic and invented landscapes which hopefully transport the viewer to a tranquil place. Claire uses a digital photomontage approach in Adobe Photoshop, combining and juxtaposing digitally cut out original photographic details to create an entirely new scene. Photography, for her is a way of seeing and connecting with the world. She captures objects, details, surfaces, and vistas that she feels drawn to, many of which are encountered on walks or trips to the coast. Claire has always been attracted to found, surface textures, such as peeling layers of paint in doorways or on the undersides of boat, incidental marks found in the urban environment and patterns made by nature; She sees beauty in these surfaces and the fact that they are made without intention, over time or by accident. She is excited to use them as colourful marks and patterns in her own work instead of creating them with a brush as a painter would. In combination they give her work an element of abstraction, which she then contrasts with more figurative and recognisable photographic elements. Creating a photomontage is like solving a puzzle and Claire’s motivation in creating these works has always been to reach a quiet place where all the pieces fit together and everything is resolved. Claire never plans her work, and begins by combining various photographic details. She works on several artworks at one time. It is a slow, sometimes meditative process. For her, the enjoyable part of the process is the continual adding and subtracting of photographic layers within an image until a point is reached where nothing more needs adding or taking away. Claire's work 'Of the Sea' is now in the permanent collection of the Historic Chatham Dockyard. Claire Gill was born and raised in the outskirts of London and now lives in West Sussex in the South East of England. She initially trained as a textile designer at Central Saint Martins College and the Royal College of Art in London before going to work for Italian Designers Valentino and Alberta Ferretti. She often used photography as a way of visually researching projects and also taught herself how to use Adobe Photoshop as a way of visually communicating her ideas. This approach to work has since formed the basis of her work as an artist.