Left unspoken

Conners Conners | 2024

Camille Cargill

Clutching, covering, concealing, personal private public

Luminous edges enclose the resignation to an intergenerationally divined series of events

A consuming circling gathers more as it turns and turns and turns and turns and

Grief means never having to be alone, but loss means never getting answers to your questions

Saidiya Hartman writes that working with trauma requires “a willingness to look into the open casket”, which naturally begs the question—“do the possibilities [afforded by doing so] outweigh the dangers..?” When working with trauma, “how does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”

Left unspoken experiments with a trauma-informed approach to practice of art, motivated by conscientious compassion and a desire to make working with pain, less painful. It comes from an aspiration to make working with trauma sustainable; avoid causing harm to the artist or their related parties; and to safeguard the spectator from feeling like a bystander to the artist’s trauma.

Left unspoken conjures emotional landscapes from occasionally personal archives, attempting to embody the corporeal and cerebral traces of trauma that occur as after-image. The work seeks to raise consciousness of one’s physical being, intending to create a sympathetic relationship between survivors and viewers. This affective encounter may prompt an understanding for the continuing consequences for survivors. The expressions enduring in the mind and body long after the cataclysmic event(s) have passed cause arguably greater adversity than the initial event ever did. Compassion for how trauma impacts one long term is often overlooked. Just because violence has ended, does not mean that the reverberations those experiences caused end too.

Whilst discussing trauma and creating art with and about it is imperative, for many people it can be re-traumatising. To address this, Left unspoken engages practices of withholding and placeholding to help negotiate the interplay between revealing and concealing. When withholding, identificatory elements and explanations oscillate between being removed, transposed (eg. through placeholders), or decontextualised—as a means of protection to both viewer and artist. Placeholding is the using of sympathetic emblems or narratives to distil extenuating experiences of personal trauma, in a trauma-informed way. Throughout this exhibition, details of personal experiences and connections have, at times, been protectively redacted, reframed or simply - left unsaid.

The exhibition asks you to consider the innate vulnerability we share as humans in relation to our behaviour and actions. As artists and people, what are we comfortable or willing to inflict upon others, and what are we trying to achieve for ourselves and our audiences?

To enquire about an available work or to request more information, please find contact details below -

camillecargill@gmail.com.