Location London, UK
Artist's biography
Charlotte Hammond is a British visual artist and writer/researcher based in London. Growing up she was very shy and dressing up, down and across socially prescribed borders made her a spirit, constituting an important means of expression for the artist. Increasingly interested in the intersections between performance, gender and dress in Caribbean and diasporic culture, she has been producing costume performance work and developing research along these themes for the past ten years. She has recently returned from a year spent on the French Caribbean island of Martinique where she has been pursuing an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary research project, which looks at male-to-female transvestite performances in contemporary Francophone Afro-Caribbean visual culture. For more information on her research and artistic practice see: http://leblogdehammond.wordpress.com/
The work
These images are taken from blog posts and facebook albums compiled in connection with a research project into cross-gender performances in Caribbean culture. Many of the images were produced during carnival time on the French Caribbean island of Martinique. This period remains one of the few occasions on the island for individuals identifying with a range of gendered behaviours and sexual orientations to express themselves freely through ostentatiously costumed displays. The subjects in the images are characters I have met (and performed alongside in some cases) as part of an investigation into how visual representation of varying forms of transvestite and cross-dressing practices are received by audiences both on the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe and in metropolitan France.
Links Bloglink: http://leblogdehammond.wordpress.com/
