52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved

PHOTOGRAPHY

Oct 20

Over a year, Leicester-based artist and educator Clair Robins turned her camera toward her teenage daughter. 52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved traces a quiet negotiation between mother and child: some moments offered, others withheld. Moving between spontaneous portraiture, still life and tactile process, it is a tender record of becoming, and of letting go.

Photography Clair Robins

15-16 years

These images drawn from a larger body of work, emerged from a year-long photographic collaboration with my teenage daughter. What began as a simple intention to spend time together gradually evolved into an ongoing visual dialogue, exploring the subtle transformations that accompany both adolescence and motherhood.

Through photography, we documented not only moments in time but the shifting identities, negotiations, and growing independence that shape this period of change. The images became traces of an evolving relationship. Some moments were willingly offered, while others were reluctantly captured, reflecting the tension between closeness and distance, visibility and concealment.

Participation and refusal became central gestures within the work, shaping what could be photographed and what remained beyond reach. The project moves between spontaneous portraiture and gentle construction. Some photographs arise unexpectedly when light, circumstance, and presence align; others are guided by loose prompts that allow narratives to unfold organically. This rhythm mirrors the nature of our relationship: fluid, unpredictable, and continually transforming. Each image bears the imprint of negotiation, balancing my desire to preserve with her evolving agency to reveal, withhold, or resist.

The resulting body of work encompasses portraiture, still life, and tactile experimental processes, together forming a visual record of becoming. Like metamorphosis itself, the transformation depicted is rarely dramatic. Instead, subtle shifts in posture, gesture, mood, and presence accumulate over time, revealing change in quiet and often unnoticed ways. The work embraces transformation as an ongoing process rather than a fixed moment of arrival. While deeply personal, the project speaks to broader experiences of adolescence, memory, family, and change. Referencing the traditions of the family album while gently unsettling its conventions, the photographs move between documentation and imagination, fact and interpretation.

Ultimately, 52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved considers photography as a living act: a means of preserving what is fleeting while acknowledging its inevitable transformation, and of witnessing metamorphosis as it quietly unfolds.

Absent

Balance

Contained Butterfly

“We documented not only moments in time but the shifting identities, negotiations, and growing independence that shape this period of change.”

Delicate

Future

Good Luck

Puzzle

About Clair

Robins is a photographic visual artist and FE educator based in Leicester, UK. An obsessive image-maker, her practice has evolved throughout her life, overlapping traditional and digital photographic processes. Her work often stems from close observation of the everyday, where nostalgia, memory and conceptually constructed scenarios emerge through storytelling. Visual language, narrative and aphoristic humour collide within intimate and personal compositions. Still life, portraiture, collections and artefacts merge with memorabilia, creating layered explorations of identity and lived experience. Through thoughtful reflection on who we are and how we live, Robins’ work reveals that the mundane is never truly mundane.

To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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Over a year, Leicester-based artist and educator Clair Robins turned her camera toward her teenage daughter. 52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved traces a quiet negotiation between mother and child: some moments offered, others withheld. Moving between spontaneous portraiture, still life and tactile process, it is a tender record of becoming, and of letting go.

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JC Verona

52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved

“We documented not only moments in time but the shifting identities, negotiations, and growing independence that shape this period of change.”

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