Emma Bäcklund was awarded the runner-up Photoworks Prize at the 2015 London College of Communication Photography Degree Show for her project Phantom Limbs.
Phantom Limbs
The photograph encapsulates all movements, giving them boundaries, limits. Phantom Limbs investigate processes where engagement and distance coexist, and propose an intense activity within the passive. Separating the body from its familiar form and anatomy, the photographs create a space in which an integral play between detached numbness and static movement is performed.
The democratic surface of the photographic print question established ideas of form through the image. Various materials that differ in weight, scale and meaning such as clay, dough and the physical body become indifferent and escape their original tangible qualities to be found in another type of materiality, the image. The photograph starts to become a substitute and represent new constructed ideas of embodiment. Is the only way we can understand the abstract to place it within the context of bodily form? Formlessness is forced into a shape and that which is unsolved is invented and explained in forms to fit our understanding.
