Biography

Clare Humphries lives and works as a print-based artist in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice explores ‘objects of the dead’, the personal
possessions that have been left behind after someone has
died. Clare holds a Bachelor of Fine Art and is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at RMIT where she also lectures in the fine art, printmaking program. Her prints are represented in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Geelong Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia and the City of Whitehorse, Melbourne.

Illustrated Talk

Crossing over: What remains and what returns
On the day my sister-in-law died the nurses tried to prepare me for her passing. They said I would ‘feel’ the difference in the hospital room, that the woman I knew would cross over and her body would become ‘just a body.’ For those who are left behind death can indeed be experienced as a threshold of events that transforms what remains. Among the things that change are the everyday possessions of the deceased. These ordinary things can carry extra-ordinary connections and may even substitute for bodily presence of those we have lost. Unlike memento mori personal possessions are not originally intended as memorial artefacts but they can acquire entirely new resonances after death; they can seem to accrue ‘aura’ in their afterlife. In this paper I consider the notion of the aura in relation to objects that have ‘crossed over’ from mass-produced commodity to everyday, personal item and finally into family relic. Drawing on my print-based research into objects of the dead I explore the idea that aura is not located in certain objects, or indeed in specific artworks or modes of art production. Rather, it emerges from an engagement between a person and an object of perception. I suggest that aura it is a form of subjective encounter analogous to reverie or contemplation. It is fuelled by the spectral effects of trace that arise when we encounter something—such as an object or a print—that exceeds ontological oppositions between absence and presence. Through considering some of Walter Benjamin’s lesser-known texts, I therefore argue that aura is an inter-subjective phenomenon bound up in the moment of reception. It is not opposed to reproduction or progressive politics; in-fact it persists in contemporary life through things that have ‘crossed over’ and that disrupt the smooth logic of time and corporeality.