Tegan Clay

Tegan Clay is an artist working and residing between London and West Yorkshire. Her work stems from written texts, which explore practices of speculative thinking, communication and negotiation through her investigations into subjective encounters to familiarity. Her work is underscored by the rerouting of material, from archival footage to excavated texts found alongside specifically filmed imagery. Her film works explore how sound, unmoored from its original context, can act as a force that governs the behaviour of an image, or can consume the visual entirely. By thinking about the potentiality of rerouting imagery and sound from their original context, she explores how placing this in a familiar close context to the body can more deeply explore connections between people, conversations and happenings, and attempt to both reveal and conceal intimacies that develop between public and private experiences of these connections. The production of feelings of desire and obsession are mediated on through an editing process that plays with real and fictional narratives explored materially, through relationships of layered imagery, language and perception. In these film works, Tegan creates boundaries between reality and constructed worlds that explores the subjective interiority of familiar or known spaces. Themes of desire, engagement, and detachment, are investigated through an attempt to find a true intuitive response to documentation, thinking about the idea of apperception alongside the way a camera unobtrusively documents locations or events through the very subjective lens of a director. Her work communicates acts of labour that maintain bodily existence, navigate narratives of pleasure, and that explore contradictory subjectivities, through the interplay of human figures and the environments that they inhabit.