speaking from the I eye #4

The abject body and the construction of a scene meet in this speaking from the I eye program. Two short films by Naarm (Melbourne) based artist Claire Lambe are accompanied by the reading of a newly commissioned text by Brussels based artist Eleanor Ivory Weber.

In Claire Lambe’s Sudden Bursts Of Nasty Laughter, she directs her attention towards rebellious or insubordinate imagery, and the process of filmmaking. Sick of the word ‘transgressive,’ a word she explains has no agency in it, Lambe turns instead towards the ambiguity of autobiographical reinterpretation and memory. 

I think I'm Turning Into a Monster is an earlier video that the artist describes as marking a transition between sculptural and filmic work in her practice, which has long been interested in and referenced films by other people.

Eleanor Ivory Weber responds with a newly commissioned short story.

Claire Lambe was born in Macclesfield, England in 1962, and lives and works in Melbourne. For more than two decades, Lambe’s distinctly referential art practice has explored the material and transformative possibilities of sculpture—and more recently the relationships between object/form and image/photograph—to unsettle conventional notions around gender and class. Lambe has exhibited in Australia and overseas, including at the National Gallery of Australia, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, National Gallery of Victoria. Along with Elvis Richardson, Lambe was co-founder of Death Be Kind, an artist-run project that ran from 2010 to 2012. She is represented by Sarah Scout Presents.

Eleanor Ivory Weber is a writer, artist and publisher. Her writing commonly takes the form of essays and criticism linking visual and performing arts with philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her performances work through montage, provisional fourth walls, determined duration, printed matter and the vocalization of text and song. She is co-founder and co-director with Camilla Wills of Divided, a publishing house established in Brussels and London. Since 2025 she is a PhD candidate at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, both in Brussels, where she focuses on Lacanian theory and the interrelation of anachronism, liveness and riddle.