FORMAT Photoforum: Clare Strand

About

"There is always something odd, in a good way, about Strand's work. That oddity rests in the tension between her often personal, always playful take on conceptualism and her wilfully old-fashioned methods, the archive images, black-and-white tones and kinetic machines here are a case in point." - Sean Ohagan. Guardian review of the show, Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time, 2015.

Strand's work is held in the collections of Arts Council England; The National Collection; The British Council; The Folkwang Museum; The Unicredit Bank; The New York Library; The Victoria and Albert Museum; The Centre Pompidou and many private collections There are two publications Clare Strand Monograph published by Steidl (2007) and Skirts published by GOST (2013). Strand is also one half of the ideas based collective MacDonaldStrand and Head of the Intangible for The Institute of Unnecessary Research.

Clare's work is currently being exhibited at the Pompidou Centre, Paris; The National Media Museum, Bradford; The Museum for Photography Thessaloniki, Greece; and Oct Loft, Shenzhen China. In June 2015, Strand had her second London solo show at GrimaldiGavin Gallery, entitled Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time. This performative exhibition employed kinetic machines, film and photography to explore the promise and the limitations of the photographic medium.

She is currently working on a new book with MACK, entitled Girl Plays with Snake, which will be published for August 2016.

Camilla Brown is a curator, writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in photography. For ten years she was a Senior Curator at The Photographers' Gallery, London. Previous to which she was Exhibitions Curator at Tate Liverpool.