Spectrum by Claudia Legge: Traversing through the unknown
From the Himalayas to Havana Claudia Legge’s photography has been inspired by colour. Claudia’s current exhibition “Spectrum” at the 1930’s Talisman Gallery in the New Kings Road, London, explores her underwater world of colour and captures the colour blocking of Cuba in her travel reportage. The exhibition is staged inroom sets with the quirky vintage furniture collected and retailed by Ken Bolan, proprietor of the unique gallery, formerly a garage and engineers workshop.
To enable her experiments with models, perspex sheeting, light and reflections in the bottom of swimming pools, Claudia completed a commercial diving course; wearing a head mask she assembled scaffolding in a water-filled quarry in Wales, now she is technically qualified to work on an oil rig or dive for pearls. This underwater expertise is coupled with her digital Canon 5D camera with aluminium housing and her persuasive imagination; her friends find themselves deep in turquoise pools holding their breath to achieve various surreal images. Playing with coloured light reflecting through the water their skin turns scarlet, or oranges float towards female forms and a naked preRaphaelite haired girl hovers above a dolls house, bubbles of breath are precisely frozen by the fast shutter speed. But what does it all mean? Claudia replies “Our bodies absorb colour energy through the vibration colour gives off. All organs, body systems, and functions are connected to these energy centres effected by colour.” Claudia hopes these colours will have a positive neurological effect on her audience.
Claudia’s first exhibit was in Paris when she collaborated with Anoushka Beckwith for A Wanderer’s Eye, a worldwide collective of female artists. seven exhibitions in London and one in New York since 2012.
For a series of street scenes in Cuba, Claudia researched her painted wall locations then lay in wait with her Canon 5D,sometimes all day, for the right human subject to appear, usually captured in profile and often in silhouette.All the photographs are in limited editions of 25, some had been had sold even before the private view.
This effervescent photographer lives in a yurt next to her barn studio. Walking is her other passion that translates into her landscape photography; with her Hasselblad and Pentax 67 she yomped around the Annapurna Massif and Iceland’s beaches taking haunting pictures in colour that actually look like black and white.
Claudia’s first exhibit was in Paris when she collaborated with Anoushka Beckwith for A Wanderer’s Eye, a worldwide collective of female artists; with seven exhibitions in London and one in New York since 2012, this is a young photographer going places.