To Behold and Appear: An Interview with Clare Samuel

In Clare Samuel’s most recent work, A disturbance in the air (2025), a woman traces the contours of her face. On a second projection screen, another woman does the same. As though compelled by a mysterious force, the women brush and preen and stroke their skin and hair. The figures are arranged in adjacent spaces, forcing the viewer to look back and forth between them, unable to perceive both at once. Samuel’s video installation explores the nuances of seeing and being seen; the split internal experience of being the surveyor and the surveyed.

Emerging first from intuition, then developed along with and through extensive research, much of Clare’s work interrogates the gaze and body politic. Ahead of her solo exhibition at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon in November 2025, I spoke to Clare about her process and impetus to create; her work, which has traced a relief of feminist histories; and her interest in the gendered experience of perception and being perceived.

Lodoe Laura (LL): Your newest work is called A disturbance in the air. What can you tell us about the origins of the title?

Clare Samuel (CS): The work is about vision and the experience of seeing and being seen, particularly how that plays out for women and other marginalized genders, but also in general. I was really thinking about how vision can be a very physical or visceral thing, a bit like the haptic visuality that they talk about in film theory. That’s about how seeing certain images and sound combinations in film can trigger the sensation of touch for a viewer. But I was also thinking about how being looked at can feel physical—how you can feel frozen in a hostile gaze, or struck by it. I’m thinking of Barbara Kruger’s piece Your gaze hits the side of my face (1981), and conversely, how a loving gaze can hold and support you.

The installation includes two text pieces centred on the etymologies of the verbs “to behold” and “to appear.” I chose behold rather than look or see because it has that association to touch, closeness, or intimacy, in ways that can be both supportive or violent (e.g., there are connotations of ownership and control in the definitions).

I’d looked at theories and ideas about vision in film (people like Laura Mulvey and Laura U. Marks), art history and psychology, but nothing in these was giving me ideas for titles that would work. So, I started looking much further back in history and found Aristotle’s writings on the senses. He disagreed with Plato’s emission theory of light, whereby the eyes themselves emit beams of light that illuminate the world like a searchlight. Aristotle argued that touch was the primary sense since it required direct contact, but for him, the other senses also involved contact, just filtered through a medium. In the case of light, he saw it as “a disturbance in the air” like ripples in water. I really loved that idea, and the phrase also made me think of the shift in atmosphere you can feel upon realizing you’re being looked at. It also made a lot of sense with the sound aspect of the piece, ambient recordings of places like those I shot in (gardens and parks in urban environments). There are sounds of natural life: bird song, cicadas, and flies occasionally buzzing past the microphone, but these are sporadically interrupted by sounds like airplanes, cars, and sirens.

LL: There’s an uneasiness to knowing you’re being looked at or watched, but there can also be a pleasure in being seen. It depends on the relationship between the viewer and the subject, and it seems like you are exploring the tension between these two very different feelings of being perceived.

CS: Yeah definitely, and that tension feels quite fundamental to me as an artist and maybe also as a person. When I started my photography degree in university, the theory courses had a huge impact on me. I’m from a small town in Northern Ireland and a working-class single-parent family. I grew up during the Troubles, and my life at that time felt very small and narrow. So these high-level ideas about the structures of human society and experience (things like Marxism, Feminist theory, and Post-Structuralism) were a real revelation. It felt like another, larger world was cracked open for me.

However, a lot of what we learned about the gaze and my chosen medium was really alarming and distressing: that the lens had been and is this really important tool in colonization, the oppression of women, class exploitation and so on. In first year, I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and it kind of blew my mind and broke my heart. He explored how dominant ideologies were made visible in and upheld throughout the history of art and visual culture.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.¹

CS: For a while, it was hard for me to photograph people and especially women, because how could I not just be replicating this objectifying gaze? When I came to Canada as an exchange student, there was a (in some ways refreshing) lack of that critical focus on the politics of images. Almost all my projects ended up being portraiture-based, and my undergrad thesis project actually has echoes in this new work. It was portraits of various people embracing me with my back to the camera which I triggered with a cable release, so very much about touch and vision. For me, it was a lot about the distancing and objectifying act of photographing, and short-circuiting that by having me between the camera and the subject rather than being separated from them by it.

But I did miss the more rigorous theory courses and I chose a more theory-driven thesis advisor. I was agonizing about the violence of the gaze and he countered that there were other conceptions of the gaze. That it could be affirming, validating, nurturing. He mentioned psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s writings about the gaze of the mother, of her face as being the precursor to the mirror. Having a parent’s face respond positively validates the baby—when I look, I am seen, so I exist—and in a way gives rise to understanding seeing as something it also is doing. “Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.”²

I found this perspective interesting but didn’t totally absorb it, and it was only nearly twenty years later while making this recent project that it fully resonated with me and I read more about it. It feels personally relevant too, as I didn’t have a great relationship with either parent and I think there was a lot they were dealing with that distracted them from me. Also, I was very shy as a child, in many ways still am, and being seen feels very vulnerable and sometimes dangerous. But I do also feel the drive to be seen, and to feel real. Choosing the otherwise pretty irrational career of making visual art proves that!

LL: The last time we met, you shared about your introduction to photography through a local camera club. How do you relate those experiences with your image-making practice?

CS: Haha, yes, the old man’s camera club! I had experimented with photography in this one-off workshop for unemployed youth, and something about it really appealed to me. My life was going nowhere at that time, I was about 17, living in government housing in a small town in Northern Ireland, and didn’t imagine much of a future for myself. Photography became something that I could focus on (no pun intended), but the forms it existed in that were available to me were very limited. I devoured issues of this magazine called Amateur Photographer, although it was mostly sunsets, wildlife shots, and portraits of women taken by men! I went to this local camera club and learned some technical things there, but all the members were middle-aged men. They had these models come in once, and I found it so awkward as they did all these stereotypically sexy poses for us. It was later when I went to college in York, England and visited Impressions Gallery that I saw what photography could be. I saw that it could be about ideas, complexity, imagination, about questioning things.

LL: I see a throughline in some of your work—this magic in the exchange of two figures. I see it in some of the dual portraits of To Bend and To Shape and even in your earlier work, You & I. The most magnetic part to me is the relationality between two bodies.

CS: I like the way you’ve phrased that; I haven’t thought of it quite in those terms. But definitely all my work relates to the human experience of dealing with the fact that we are fundamentally separate from each other and the world, but that also we aren’t at all. And that both positions can be really painful, or really beautiful.

LL: It strikes me that the people in your work almost always seem to be aware of the camera or of a viewer. This seems so intentional. In A disturbance in the air specifically, your subjects look directly at us. Can you talk about the process of working with the people filmed and the ideas behind the movements they make?

CS: Yes, of course, it was particularly important in that piece to have this reciprocal gaze, which is especially intense for the viewer with the moving image. In other portrait-based projects that are still images, I often also have people making eye contact with the camera. Of course, it’s not literally reciprocal. It is an image of someone; it’s an object and cannot look back at you. But our brains and nervous systems respond as if we are having this exchange, and in my opinion, that is real—it is an encounter between two forces, even if one of them is not literally there.

In a few projects, there are images of people not looking at the camera (e.g., It is, Still and To Bend and To Shape), but I think you may be right, maybe there’s still a sense that they are aware of the camera, because they are always so constructed, the poses so directed by me.

For A disturbance in the air, it started with knowing I wanted to make a moving image portraiture work, and testing out gestures like smoothing out eyebrows or putting on eye cream, and adjusting their hair. After shooting quite a lot of these, I liked them but felt like there was something missing. When I was researching in the Wendy Snyder MacNeil archive at The Image Centre last summer, I saw a documentary that she made about an artist who had gone blind, and was really struck by the way she so gently traced the planes of people’s faces when she was introduced to them. I started asking subjects to do this with their own faces, to see themselves through touch rather than vision.

For most of my portraiture projects, I ask friends to pose for me first and then branch out to friends of friends. For this one, it was important to have a wide variety of women and non-binary people in terms of age, ethnicity, body shape, and so on.

LL: Yeah, the gestures themselves are very mundane. But when they are assembled and accumulated together, in this intimate framing, we become much more aware of how they are communicating.

CS: Yes, the repetition of them starts to feel strange, and with the multiple projections there starts to be the sense that they are copying each other or directing each other. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience where someone wipes the corner of their mouth or something, and you think they are doing it to let you know that you have something on your face, so you do it, and then they do it again because they think you’re trying to show them they still have something on their face?! That’s a funny example of that kind of mirroring.

LL: The choice to have this as a two-channel video feels deliberate in that you can’t watch both subjects at the same time. There is an imperceptibility to the fullness of both figures at once, which is part of it, but there is also this kind of alchemy that happens when the figures move together.

CS: For the installation at Public Space One in Iowa City, there were two floating screens at a right angle to each other showing the portraits. I tested configurations of having them beside each other and facing each other (which felt too confrontational), but that layout worked best for the space and created a sense of the viewer being in this kind of triangular relationship to the two of them, and their body being activated as they look back and forth between them. There was also a third channel of footage of reflective surfaces, and in future installations I might use more screens and integrate that footage with the figures, so the viewing relationships are continually shifting in the space. I’m also just starting to work on a single-channel version that will show in a window space at Gallery TPW in Toronto in June 2025.

LL: Can you talk about the choice of 16mm as a medium for A disturbance in the air?

CS: It certainly made it a lot harder and more expensive than just using video, but it felt like an important difference. The work is about photography in many ways, and analogue film seemed to connect more to that. I also really like the limitations of shooting analogue in general, the fact that you (or the portrait subject) can’t see the image right away creates some distance that I think is important. And then the actual visual quality of it I do find different; the colours are richer, and with 16mm it has a more tactile quality because of tiny imperfections in the movement of the frames, the grain, and occasional dust, which related well to the ideas in this work about more embodied vision.

LL: It seems like you’re drawn to movement over still images these days. Is this true?

CS: I have been making more moving images in the last few years, but am definitely also still making photographs. I think they’ll both remain central for me. In moving image work, there’s a very direct relationship with the viewer, the image is kind of happening to them. And with a photograph, it’s more level ground, there’s more of a choice of what to look at and for how long.

LL: What to look at and for how long—that is such a great way to put it.

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Clare Samuel is a visual artist originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BFA from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work focuses on connection and distances between the self and other, as well as notions of social division, borders, and belonging. Spanning mediums such as photography, video, text and installation, her projects are often a dialogue with the idea of portraiture. She has exhibited internationally, most recently at OBORO, Belfast Exposed, and VU Photo. She teaches at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her practice has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. Clare is co-founder and co-director of Feminist Photography Network, a nexus for research on the relationship between feminism and lens-based media.

Lodoe Laura is an artist and writer. After years of working in archives, galleries, museums and artist-run spaces, she is pursuing an education in Traditional Eastern Medicine. When not looking at or writing about art, you might find her in nature, making pottery, or teaching classes focused on embodied movement.

1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books Ltd, 1972), 46.
2. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications Limited, 1971), 117.

This article is published in issue 42.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue