Charlotte Gould

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My work across media uses fracture and fragmentation as both a formal language and a way of understanding experience. Across photography, sculpture, and works on paper, I find ways to cut, separate, and reassemble as a way to reflect a world that reveals itself to me in parts. Vision is partial; we can only perceive the world in pieces: buildings assembled from industrial materials, bodies composed of merged fragments, and landscapes defined by shifting planes and angles. I prize rupture in life and nature as an inflection point through which change can happen. The new perspective that emerges from the fracture might be lyrical, uncomfortable, or idiosyncratic. In my street photography, I look for charged, unstable interactions in the cityscape. I also try to apprehend the moments when nature becomes disjointed and for the beauty within those changes. This fragmentation sometimes reflects trauma, as in my Shooter in the Crowd series. Trauma can disrupt linear time, persisting as sensory and emotional fragments rather than coherent narrative. My own experience of trauma has shaped how I perceive the world, producing a heightened sensitivity that collapses past and present. The Shooter works emerge from this state: trauma as a trick of the light that reveals violence rather than joy. In others of my photography series such as “Halloween,” “Intersections,” and “Coney Island,” I capture moments of fleeting yet intense emotion within the propulsive current of New York City...

Artwork