REBECCA
BOWRING
Switzerland
Knowing Thunder Gives Away What Lightning Tries to Hide
When the lockdown began to spread in our consciousness and our lives, Rebecca Bowring was stunned at the familiarity she felt with this state of separation from friends, family, and from life as she knew it. It was as if she had experienced the feeling before.
Rebecca used the time that lockdown offered to sort through pictures taken a few years earlier with an analogue camera. Looking back, she noticed that they represented both a sense of confinement and a search for escape. She realized that taking these pictures was a way of breathing, a way of detaching herself from impossible situations to escape her partner’s control.
The pre-existing images surrounding the subject of domestic abuse did not represent what Rebecca was experiencing. She didn’t identify with the bruises, the broken ribs, the flowing of blood. Through this project, Rebecca proposed another view on the photographic representation of domestic abuse. She pasted some of her photos on the walls of her home and photographed them again to visually represent the emotional experience that she had felt. She added other photos as they were, to create a feeling of uncertainty and to represent the multiple and complex, sometimes contradictory, feelings involved in being confined by a toxic relationship. Loneliness, permanent adaptation and self-effacement so as not to provoke the thunder that is never far away.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Rebecca Bowring (b. 1985) is an artist from Geneva, Switzerland. Her practice approaches photography as a medium that is both durable and fragile at the intersection of our singular and collective memories. The notion of trace and absence runs through her work. Rebecca is a graduate of the Vevey School of Photography and the University of Art and Design of Geneva.
