Chloe Dewe Mathews: Guest Lecture

Chloe started her career off practising film and working with several different teams and large production groups. She says that she finds the film industry, “…like a bubble.” “Its like another world, whereas I wanted to be in a real world with real people.”

She worked on a project that was called Banger Boys. This was a project about people who would buy cheap cars and then modify and race later on in the week. Chloe explained how she appreciated the subculture and how people were putting into work to create something and then destroy it. This was their way of getting the most out of the machinery around them, a,”… surge of excellence.” 

I personally really like how Chloe isn’t a massive fan of having her work displayed in a magazine and would rather present it in person. For example with the Banger Boys project she displayed some of the prints onto aluminium. I thought this was really clever as she’s using authentic materials to present her work on. She also had them shown in a garage which tied along with the theme as well. From this she was able to sell one of her pieces for £3000. 

Another main project that Chloe has worked on was when she hitchhiked from China back to Britain with her husband which took 10 months and ended up shooting 1400 images on film. This project was about the relationships between the east and the west. She said that this project wasn’t about research of looking into the culture of that particular country it was about going out there and talking to people and hearing it first hand. Her idea was to respond to what they were seeing. 

The struggle of trying to be original with travel images when sometimes repetition isn’t a negative thing. After the trip she was looking back on her images and felt as if she had taken nothing that was really good, however after further review it was evident that there were some images that had some very powerful themes in them. She allowed the Sunday Times to publish her work provided the opportunity to ask them to publish more of her work in the future.