UK : Edmund Clark’s immersive study of prison life goes on show at the Ikon Gallery

“We are a faceless, forgotten part of society,” says one of the inmates at HMP Grendon, where Edmund Clark has been artist-in-residence for the last three years; his work at the prison is now going on show in Birmingham.

“I hate myself because I am a murderer… You can’t save me… We are a faceless, forgotten part of society…”. These are just some of the intimate, often devastating thoughts of the inmates at HMP Grendon, a category B men’s facility in Buckinghamshire and Europe’s only “wholly therapeutic” prison. Their words accompany My Shadow’s Reflection, a series informed by Edmund Clark’s artist-in-residence at Grendon, which forms part of his larger body of work, In Place of Hate, on show at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham from 06 December.

Clark, winner of BJP’s International Photography Award in 2009 and many more since, has long been interested in issues surrounding confinement and incarceration, having previously made work on Guantánamo, Bagram Air Base, control-order houses and elderly lifers at HMP Kingston. “The deprivation of liberty is a profound political act,” he says. “Why it is done, where it is done and how it is done are questions that reveal a great deal about the societies they represent.”

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