T5 ARTIST CASE STUDY: CLARE WEEKS
- Apr 6
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
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.
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)
