Simone Gorman-Clark, Fire Within (SINGLE SHOT 2023)

Simone Gorman-Clark is a Visual Creative who was born in Brisbane and lives on the Gold Coast, Australia. Her art practice encompasses photography and mixed media, and through her work Simone aspires to evoke emotion and challenge the perception of her viewers, to create a dialogue and raise awareness. ‘Fire Within’ is a visual representation of how long-term disenfranchised grief smothers the fire within, almost to the point of extinction, and how a nurtured creative passion has the power to ignite the dampened embers into a raging transformative fire. I created this self-portrait in total darkness using light painting techniques and captured it all in camera within a single long exposure. In my mind’s eye with this piece, light was sprinkling from above and then drawing down on my half-visible face, to suggest something was sucking the life out of me and snuffing out my internal fire. The other half of my face was not visible and small flames were building, to suggest something was bringing me back to life, like petrol thrown onto my internal fire. Each side of my face opposed, and I was watching a transformative work in progress that could go either way at any time. Sitting on a stool in complete darkness and trying to remain perfectly still in my head and shoulders, I picked up my coloured torches and fibre optics in sequence to paint like a brush with light over my face. Because of the movement created by my arms, my head would often follow resulting in a blurry image, and it took many attempts to achieve the final result. I became overwhelmed with emotion when I viewed the back of my camera to see what had been captured within the long exposure. My mind’s eye vision reflected back at me to become the visual representation of my lived experience as Fire Within.

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