Biography

Phrame is an informal and lively collective of people whose focus is on promoting and supporting the work of emerging female photographers in the South Wales area. This is partly to address the imbalance that currently exists: there is a shortage of opportunities for women to exhibit and publish their photographic work, and the collectives that have formed in Wales which are largely male-dominated. The collective’s aim is to raise the profile of work created by Phrame members through exhibitions, talks, and mutual support.

Phrame also stages less conventional interventions and provocations to challenge unhelpful stereotyping, to ask important questions about the place and value of women’s practice, and to push the boundaries of photography in terms of process as well as artefact.

Phrame was co-founded in 2018 by Celia Rose Jackson and Lisa Edgar, with the support of Lydia Pang. The collective is open to everyone, regardless of age, gender, race, class or creed. They offer a warm welcome, shared expertise and energy, and an inclusive atmosphere to all.

PHRAME brings together a number of active and emerging female photographers in this, their inaugural show as a collective, curated for Diffusion 2019. While the work on display is richly varied in content, there are some common strategies and modes of approach. A number of the exhibitors share a passion for documenting the world around them and an interest in both story-telling and gathering the stories of others through engagement and interaction. There is also a preoccupation with the materiality of photography, notably analogue processes including the use of pinhole cameras, paper negatives and cyanotype. In some quarters there is, somewhat paradoxically, a sense of the inadequacy of the medium of photography to express fully the complexities of lived experience or of the world at large. This manifests itself in the use of mixed media and text to create complex, layered work that stretches conventional definitions of photography.

The interactivity of PHRAME’s approaches and practices, both individual and shared, directly references Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics, where the “artist” or facilitator is viewed as a catalyst for human interaction rather than being at the centre of the work. For PHRAME members, the unconventional use of the coffee bar, the disused shop or the converted church as social space is proving to be an inclusive and stimulating environment for the exploration of some key concerns within the photographic discourse.

Artists
Lorna Cabble
Kate Mercer / Dai Howell
Ayesha Khan
Tess Seymour
Faye Lavery-Griffiths
Tracey Paddison
Savanna Dumelow
Faye Chamberlain
Megan Winstone
Sarah Hayton
Molly Caenwyn
Jane Nesbitt