Hannah’s Hands, 2022.
Cath Cartman is an artist, researcher and creator of the artist carer manifesto. Based out of her home darkroom in Norfolk, U.K., she uses photography, archives and text to explore the social, somatic and material connections between photographic practice and invisible care work.
Cath’s work has been profoundly shaped by her experiences as a single parent and unpaid carer, connecting her to universal truths about our mutual dependencies, while forcing her to embrace uncertainty. Working ‘in the dark’ and with elements of chance, she uses slow and embodied image-making processes - long walks and long exposures; cameraless, pinhole and large format photography - to access what Walter Benjamin termed the optical unconscious, where hidden perceptions are unearthed, and invisible connections made.
Cath works with archive material to retell individual and collective histories, with a particular focus on who gets to be remembered, and how. She writes and talks about nineteenth-century histories of gender, disability and ableism, and advocates for more care-focused and socially-just approaches to photographic historiography. She delivers photography and archive research workshops in community and gallery settings, and has fifteen years’ experience as an arts’ access support worker.