Zara Carpenter

Zara Carpenter is a visual artist based in Rochester, UK. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between analogue photography, painting, poetry, printmaking and sculptural assemblage. Working with processes including Polaroid, wet plate collodion, camera-less photography and physical interventions to the photographic surface, Carpenter explores the complexities of pain, grief, trauma, memory and the vulnerability of living in a body affected by invisible illness. Images may be abraded, chemically altered, weathered or buried, allowing chance, material change and the natural environment to become collaborators in the work.

Carpenter is self-taught and co-founded SICK! Living With Invisible Illness in 2017, an Arts Council England-supported project bringing artists and audiences together around experiences that are often unseen. She received an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant in 2018. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in private and public collections, including Wellcome Collection. Distress Prints was selected as a finalist in the Lens Culture Art Photography Awards 2022.

Carpenter has published five artist books: 36+8 Polaroids, Bed, Flowers, Distress and Relics of Healing. Alongside her studio practice, she delivers artist talks and workshops concerned with mental health, wellbeing, zines and invisible illness, including activity with Wellcome Collection. For Art on the Delta, Carpenter presents work developed with photographer Rikard Österlund through a year-long residency in Rochester Cathedral's King's Orchard Gardens. The resulting display brings together photography, print and process-led material, recording seasonal change while extending Carpenter's interest in fragility, transformation, memory and the passage of time.

Check out her website here: https://www.zaracarpenter.com/