The second shift

Clare’s practice centres on themes of home and care, primarily using photography. Her previous projects have focused on overlooked elements of domestic life, seeking value in the daily work of mothering and home, and challenging perceptions of home life as leisured, insignificant and safe.
In The Second Shift she looked at the invisible work of home and childcare primarily carried out by women on top of their paid employment. The series was published as a photobook which was named as one of The Guardian’s top 15 photobooks of the year, incorporating a quietly angry poem by Leontia Flynn, and using cropping and layering to destabilise and denaturalise notions of home.
Her work-in-progress Touch/Hunger turns towards the attachments and tensions in relationships of and with the home, the performance of care, as well as invisible mental and emotional labour. It explores the contradictions of intimacy and claustrophobia situated there, and maternal anxiety about loss or separation at the same time as the increasing detachment of teenagers. source: www.claregallagher.co.uk