T5 ARTIST CASE STUDY: CLARE WEEKS
- Apr 6
- 7 min read
Updated: May 15
I have been exploring the practice of Clare Weeks, a photomedia artist based in Newcastle who works across digital and performance video. Her practice is interdisciplinary and centred on autographic portraiture, where she uses her own body to explore illness, identity, and the relationship between fragility and endurance.
Weeks completed a PhD at the University of Newcastle in 2020 titled Theatre, autopathography and the medicalised self: imaging health from the shadows of illness. This research is grounded in her lived experience of multiple sclerosis, which she has been documenting since her diagnosis in 2011. Her work aims to make visible what is usually unseen, focusing on the internal experience of chronic illness rather than its outward appearance.
Figure 2: © Clare Weeks, Theatre, autopathography and the medicalised self: imaging health from the shadows of illness (2020)
In her current exhibition CHRONOP: Pathographic Studies (2026), at Straitjacket Weeks uses performance and video-derived chronophotography to examine the body in motion. Sequential still images are extracted from video footage, allowing subtle shifts, repetitions, and instabilities in movement to become visible. The body is not presented as a fixed form, but as something constantly shifting and uncertain.
The work is expanded through installation. Enlarged photographic sequences are shown alongside fragments contained in archival zip-lock bags, including bandages, pill packets, and traces of medical language. These materials shift the work from representation into documentation. The body becomes something that is observed, recorded, stored, and managed, while still holding an internal experience that cannot be fully captured.
What stands out is the tension between control and instability. The use of sequencing suggests order, but the repeated frames reveal inconsistency and disruption. The materials also carry this duality, where clinical systems attempt to contain illness, yet the lived experience remains unpredictable.
This has directly pointed me back to my installation Life in Pieces. Like Weeks, I am working with the idea of the body as something constructed rather than represented.
Weeks' use of sequencing has made me reconsider how fragmentation operates in my work. Her chronophotographic approach breaks movement into parts, showing that the body cannot be understood as a single moment. This connects to how I am working with layers. Instead of aiming for clarity, I can allow each layer to slightly misalign, so the image never fully resolves.
Her inclusion of medical materials has also shifted my thinking about objects. In Life in Pieces, the materials I use can move beyond being structural and begin to act as carriers of meaning. The concrete blocks can suggest containment and endurance, while the resin can hold and distort identity in a way that reflects pressure and instability.
Another key point is how Weeks embeds lived experience into the structure of the work. She does not explain illness through imagery. Instead, she uses repetition, sequencing, and fragmentation to communicate it. This reinforces that I do not need to make my work literal. The instability I experienced with the resin not setting properly can be understood as part of the work, rather than something to fix. It reflects the idea of a system that does not fully hold together.
Clare Weeks practice has shown me that fragmentation, repetition, and material instability can function as a language. By allowing the work to remain unresolved, I can more effectively communicate the idea of a body that is held together through structure but is constantly shifting and under pressure.
INTERVIEW WITH CLARE WEEKS
This interview has been adapted from Assessment 3. The requirement was to document and critical reflect on the process of seeking and applying professional feedback from an industry practitioner in relation to my developing career strategy and creative practice. I decided to reach out to Clare Weeks due to the strong conceptual alignment between her practice and my own.
Q1. Your research engages autopathography as a way of constructing meaning from lived experience. How do you navigate the tension between subjective, embodied knowledge and the need to formalise that experience into a coherent visual language within your photomedia and performance work?
Clare: I don’t try to resolve that tension completely. The work sits between lived experience and translation. I start with embodied knowledge, what I feel, undergo, or endure and then use photomedia and performance to give it form. The visual language develops through that process, rather than being imposed on it.
Q2. Your work often incorporates archival and medical materials within or alongside photographic imagery. How do these elements engage with the ways the body is observed and interpreted within medical contexts, and how do they help you question and challenge those systems?
Clare: Medical and archival materials reflect how the body is classified and observed from the outside. When I place them alongside my own imagery, they sit in contrast with lived experience. This allows me to question authority, disrupt clinical distance, and reinsert the subjective body into those systems.
Q3. In deciding to undertake your PhD at the University of Newcastle, how did you evaluate the role of higher research within your broader creative career? To what extent has this postgraduate research shaped your professional opportunities, artistic direction, and position within the contemporary art sector?
Clare: I initially thought I was on an academic path. I was teaching full-time while completing my PhD, but when that role disappeared, I realised those structures weren’t as stable or important as I had believed. What mattered was sustaining my practice in a way that fit my life.
My degrees haven’t directly shaped my employment. It’s been more about experience and how I fit within a team. The PhD, though, gave me time and space to deepen the work and clarify what I’m doing.
Q4. As your practice engages deeply with your lived experience of illness, there can be moments where this process becomes emotionally or psychologically challenging. How do you negotiate these challenges, and what frameworks or strategies enable you to continue developing the work in a sustainable way?
Clare: There are times when the work is physically and emotionally demanding, especially during performance. I can lose track in the moment and push too far, only realising afterwards when I’m completely exhausted and need to rest. Learning to recognise those limits is ongoing.
During my PhD I kept a journal and health diary, but I stopped when I became too aware of it as material. The writing began to feel constructed rather than necessary. Now I only return to it when I need to and keep it for myself.
Setting boundaries, allowing rest, and not forcing documentation are all part of sustaining the work.
Q5. As someone who has built a career in the arts while living with chronic disease, what advice would you offer me as I balance my creative practice and study? In particular, how do you approach time management, and what strategies have you found effective for supporting both mental and physical wellbeing?
Clare: I always say, “health comes first,” though I have to remind myself of that. I keep a Post-it note on my computer screen that says “whatever it takes” meaning whatever supports being well. Sometimes that’s working, sometimes it’s resting, and sometimes it’s doing nothing.
In terms of time, I work in smaller, flexible blocks and adjust expectations when needed. Consistency matters more than intensity.
Reflection:
I chose Clare Weeks as the artist to engage with due to both conceptual alignment and shared context. As a Novocastrian artist working across photomedia, installation, and performance, her work closely connects with my own exploration of the body as unstable and constantly shifting. More specifically, her use of autopathography, shaped by lived experience of chronic illness, provided a strong way of thinking through my own practice. The connection was not only based on shared subject matter, but also in the similarities between how we develop ideas through process and personal experience.
A key insight from Weeks’ response is her refusal to resolve the tension between lived experience and its translation into visual form. Rather than imposing a predetermined aesthetic, she allows the work to emerge through process. This has confirmed and strengthened how I approached Life in Pieces. I had already been moving toward allowing instability within the work, particularly in the resin casting process, where misalignment and distortion began to emerge. Weeks’ perspective validated this direction, reinforcing that these moments are not problems to correct but integral to the work’s language. The unstable layering within the resin head now operates more confidently as a visual equivalent to fragmentation. Similarly, in the digital video Unsolvable, the sliding tile system aligns with this thinking, functioning as a structure that resists completion. Her emphasis on maintaining tension rather than resolving it has affirmed that I am working in a direction that is both conceptually and materially resolved.
Her discussion of medical and archival materials has expanded my understanding of materiality. Weeks positions these elements in contrast to lived experience, allowing her to challenge systems that attempt to define the body externally. As I move into Semester 2 with my Capstone Project, this could become a model for further research, particularly in exploring how I might embed medical information or archival elements into my own work. This approach would allow me to strengthen the relationship between internal experience and external systems, developing a more layered dialogue rather than relying on a singular representation.
Beyond formal outcomes, Weeks’ feedback has had a significant influence on my artistic process. Her emphasis on boundaries, rest, and sustainability has been particularly important. The idea that “health comes first” and that consistency is more valuable than intensity has shifted how I manage both study and production. I have begun working in smaller, adaptable time blocks, allowing space for rest without framing it as a loss of productivity. This has not reduced output but instead established a more sustainable and responsive way of working, particularly important given the physical and mental demands of my projects.
Overall, Weeks’ feedback has informed the development of my research and reshaped my understanding of what it means to sustain a creative practice. It has reinforced how essential research is in developing and clarifying the conceptual framework of a project, while also emphasising that health must remain the priority. It is acceptable, and often necessary, to have days where no work is produced, and to reassess and remove commitments that are no longer important or sustainable. Together, these insights reinforce that limitation and interruption are not obstacles but can be integral to both the work and the conditions under which it is made.
References: Clare Weeks: CHRONOP: Pathographic Studies 2026, Straitjacket Gallery, viewed 6 April 2026, <https://straitjacket.com.au/art/11-april-3-may-2026-clare-weeks>. (Figures 1 & 3)
University of Newcastle Creative Campus 2023, Clare Weeks Interview (Loud-Sky Exhibition), YouTube, viewed 6 April 2026, <https://youtu.be/FUKZ8N4E1ZA?si=qPEFOUdyBc8lcKsM>. (Video 1)
Weeks, C. 2020, Theatre, autopathography and the medicalised self: imaging health from the shadows of illness, University of Newcastle, viewed 6 April 2026, <https://www.clareweeks.com/12208591-2020>. (Figure 2)
