| Robin Cracknell |
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I find sadness and grief exhilarating. I used to feel alien and apologetic for thinking this way but, over time, I’ve realised that this apparent contradiction is not so strange because everything is temporary--even happiness and beauty--and what is more natural than to mourn for what we love and are fated to lose?
Loss is the heart of my work; specifically the transience of childhood and how memories of that short period shape the rest of our lives. When my son was born, I felt driven to document and preserve his life in photographs but I gradually realised he was more a mirror than a subject and I was actually restaging episodes and conjuring feelings from my own childhood rather than immortalizing him as I’d intended. And maybe all photography works with way. Perhaps we are sutured into every snapshot we take and every work of art is a self-portrait regardless of what the subject appears to be.
My inspiration is cinema, to capture what Werner Herzog describes as ‘the ecstatic truth’ in everyday events but an slr camera seemed easier and more immediate than a 16 mm so I tell my story in stills rather than movies. The fizzing speed and enduring calamity of childhood; the truth without the sentimentality is what fascinates me. Through photography, occasionally layered with text, drawings and braille, I'm trying to say something about the perilous, inscrutable moonscape of those formative and often poisonous years; Not only from my own memory but also as an aging and curious parent and bystander.
The photographs themselves incorporate a unique non-digital process which combines traditional film photography with cinematography, the intention being to give these 'still' pictures a vaguely narrative quality that I hope speaks about love, loss and memory. In Portuguese, the word is ‘saudade’-- a love steeped in sadness, ‘to feel what no longer exists’. By definition, that is what photography does--to stop time, fend off oblivion, allow us to feel what no longer exists-- to remind us of what we have lost.

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| About the Artist |
Robin Cracknell's work has been exhibited and published internationally and is in many private and public collections. In 2006, he was chosen for the Saatchi-Guardian exhibit and in 2007 he had a solo exhibit of photographs and 'notebooks' at the Whitecross Gallery in London. Later that year he was selected by Saatchi for the Zoo Art Fair and, in 2008, his work sold alongside Marc Quinn, Anish Kapoor, Martin Creed and others in the BFAMI Auction at Phillips de Pury, London. |
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Click to enlarge images (if larger image has been loaded) |
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no
2006 photography/mixed media approx. 30 x 50 C-type print |
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portrait with mixed media |
eleven
2006 photography/mixed media approx. 40 x 40 C-type print |
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portrait with mixed media |
memory
2006 photography/mixed media approx. 50 x 50 C-type print |
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portrait with mixed media |
cast
2006 photography/mixed media approx. 30 x 50 C-type print |
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fractured wrist with mixed media |
jake sound
2006 photography/mixed media approx 30 x 40 C type print |
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portrait with cine overlay |
womb
2005 photography/mixed media approx 30 x 40 C type print |
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bath with mixed media cine overlay |
summer eleven
2007 photography approx 30 x 40 |
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35mm cine film. |
missing
2007 photography approx 40 x 50 |
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35mm. super 8. C-type. |
i start my relationships barefoot
2007 photography approx 40 x 50 |
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35mm. cine film. C type. |
space debris
2007 photography approx 30 x 50 |
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35mm. cine film. C-type print. |
blue lake
2007 photography approx 40 x 50 |
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C type print. |
rose
2007 photography approx 50 x 50 |
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35mm. Cine film. C type print |
swan
2006 photography approx 30 x 50 |
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35 mm. mixed media. |
prince
2008 C-type approx 40 x 50 |
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35mm and cine film |
necklace
2008 photograph approx 50 x 50 |
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C-type print, mixed media |
the glass eaters
2008 photograph approx 40 x 50 cm |
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35mm. cine film. |
bullied version
2008 photography approx 40 x 50 |
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C-type print from damaged film |
denmark
2009 mixed media 22 x 27 |
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mixed media |
the virgin islands
2009 mixed media 22 x 27 |
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mixed media |
belong
2008 photography approx 40 x 50 |
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song of 27
2009 C-type print approx 40 x 50 |
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C-type print from mixed media |
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| Education and biography |
Raised in America, I've lived in London for almost 20 years. Originally only intending to stop over on the way back to America from Italy, I never returned home to Boston and now reside here permanently. Although I enjoy exhibiting in galleries, the widest and most satisfying exposure thus far has been as cover artist for countless book jackets --now strewn across the world fading and forgotten on tidy bookshelves, abandoned in hotel rooms, left in forlorn baskets outside charity shops or slowly decomposing under tons of landfill.
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| Future shows |
Starting with a Photograph
An exhibition of Saatchi Online Artists at Michael Hoppen Contemporary
10th September – 12th October 2009
Michael Hoppen Contemporary is delighted to collaborate with Saatchi Online for an exhibition of work by six artists, hand-picked from the Saatchi Gallery website. Entitled ‘Starting with a Photograph’, the key criterion is that the work must begin with a photographic image- found or made. Beyond that, each piece is unique,sharing only an interest in exploring and expanding the limits of photography.
The exhibition will take place at Michael Hoppen Contemporary, situated close to the new Saatchi headquarters on the King's Road in Chelsea, and will begin on the 10th September. |
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Website: www.cracknell.blogspot.com |
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