(Traduction du texte en français plus bas)

At an exhibition opening in Toronto, Clare Samuel noticed a gesture. One woman’s hand reached up to another woman’s lips. Pressed up against the skin, a finger traced the contour of a mouth, removing a stain of lipstick that had been smudged out of place. As Samuel watched the outline bend and shape back into place, watched the woman’s face flex and contort under the pressure of her friend’s finger, she catalogued the movement in her mind.

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The gesture is recreated in one of her photographs from the series To Bend and to Shape. Two women, bathed in summer sunlight, restage the action in a park for the camera. Separated from the excitement and aura of a celebratory evening, the women’s movements become foreign.

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The women in Samuel’s photographs are constantly moving in ways that are ambiguous. Stilled by the light-sensitive emulsion inside the camera, their gestures are made available for interrogation. A hand held over a face; fingers that rest gently on a knee: are these signals of care, of competition, of restraint? Her subjects often stare back at us, as if to reject the camera’s objectifying, flattening impulse.

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In a conversation with Samuel, she shared with me that the title of the series is an unpacking of the word <em>witch</em>. She told me that the root of <em>witch</em> is “<em>wic</em>, meaning to bend or shape, which could refer to materials, reality, or consciousness.” The root has another meaning: “to separate, to divide.” After our conversation, I came across another theory of <em>witch</em>’s etymology that translates as “to move”—“to make mysterious gestures.” Though Samuel’s series explicitly takes its title from this first unravelling, her images are attuned to the word’s complexity, charged with the tension of its many possible forms.

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