Claire McCarthy

‘In the absence of something that never was’ is an ongoing project investigating the spiritual and philosophical aspects of what it is to be a woman who is not a mother and the experience of an absence around something imagined.

The work also explores the complexities of what it is to be childless beyond the primary stereotype of the tragic, angry or lonely individual.

In my forties I began the challenging journey of coming to terms with my childless status, and part of that journey was to look for hope and inspiration beyond my childlessness. But instead what I found were female stereotypes represented through repeated narratives of desperate, vengeful or suicidal characters, from folklore to film it seems a woman without children is the most deviant kind.

Finding a place in the world where I am not faced with my childless status is rare. But I eventually found that place in the landscape, through walking, and photographing. And in looking beyond the physical edges of myself and my existence where bodily and material legacy does not exist I was able to create a tangible space for myself.

In not becoming a mother, I also questioned my ‘femininity’ and this work is an attempt to reconnect to my own ‘womanhood and femaleness’ through the act of photographing aspects of the landscape and domestic still life.