Chloe Lelliott completed her National Diploma in Photography at Brighton and Hove City College in 2004. She began her career as a photographer in a portrait studio and assisted other photographers on various commissions. With the desire to develop her own skills and creative voice she moved to Cornwall to further her studies and gained a BA in Photography at University College Falmouth. Here Chloe learnt the technical skills to match her passion and gained a theoretical understanding of her own work. She achieved a First Class Honours degree in 2009 and was also shortlisted for the AOP Student Photography Awards. Since graduating she has exhibited regularly and received judges choice for The Renaissance Photography Prize in 2010. She is currently doing a Masters at Brighton University.
"Photography’s ability to play with our ideas of reality and fiction has always fascinated me. How the photograph captures a moment of time and then presents it to us as a truth. Spaces and constructs also interest me, how we build them, navigate them both physically and emotionally and what effect they have on us culturally and as individuals. My curiosity and the experience of a place is partly why I photograph, the heightened sense of ‘being there in that moment’ is crucial to my practice and why I make work. The challenge of making a picture that allows the viewer to see the world anew is a constant exploration. The situations and people photography leads me to holds a lot of enjoyment. Even the most ugly or boring places can become in an instant magical to me.
With the project Between Silence and White Walls I wanted to take a step back and pause to reflect upon the architecture and spaces we inhabit. It is a photographic exploration of communal everyday spaces but also sets and stages that represent our reality or an ideal. Places designed for a specific reason or those that fail in their purpose, the mundane and bizarre, a look at a hyper real world of a constructed fantasy. Although unpopulated they not only hold for me the performance of the everyday played within but also stand as mirrors to us as their creators. Taken from their context silenced without the actions of their purpose these places are subverted and leave us displaced."
