Interviews – Claire Lambe: Mother Holding Something Horrific

Claire Lambe: Mother Holding Something Horrific is a major exhibition of newly commissioned work by Melbourne-based, English-born artist Claire Lambe. Encompassing sculpture, photography and theatrical mise-en-scène, Lambe creates intimate and intense psychological spaces in an ambitious attempt to describe the human condition in its cruel reality and horrifying glory.

Known for her strange and often abject sculptural forms, Lambe’s work explores psychological narratives of gender, sexuality, identity and class, leading to anxious objects full of revelatory and emancipatory potential.

In a deeply subjective and sometimes transgressive practice of psychodrama and catharsis, Lambe draws upon a rich bank of personal history and reference material as a starting point for her investigation into the ambiguity between memory and experience, reality and re-enactment.

Claire Lambe: Mother Holding Something Horrific charges ACCA’s gallery spaces with a series of corporeal sculptures and dramatic installations that are at once uncanny, anarchic and full of life and libido. The installation will be further enlivened by an occasional series of performances by contemporary dancer and choreographer Atlanta Eke, to be developed in the gallery space over the course of the exhibition, continuing an ongoing collaboration between the two artists.

Watch curators Annika Kristensen and Max Delany and artist Claire Lambe discuss the exhibition in this video.