Amelia Crouch

At the start of the residency, Amelia spent time in the galleries, looking at the work on display, and watching how people interacted with the artworks. She took a series of photos of fragments of paintings from partially obscured viewpoints, and then placed the photos low down around the gallery, thus making the viewer take up an unnatural position to see the image.

The glimpses had a powerful effect, changing the confident display of a domestic scene in a public gallery into a voyeuristic watching of an intimate moment. Amelia said:

'I am interested in how looking can seem very natural and objective but actually choices of how we look and questions of what is shown to us are involved in the creation of knowledge. The way they are only glimpsed and the photos are blurred might convey a feeling of voyeurism, sort of turning the images into subjects, real people or agencies rather than paintings. But is it the sitter, or the artist represented? Might it make the viewer think about what I had to do (almost lying on the floor to take the photos) to take the photos as an artist now. And what will their relation to the image be?'