Anne-Marie Creamer

About

Single Sentence

Anne-Marie Creamer develops research-based film and installation projects through deep institutional collaboration, practising what she calls "ethical custodianship" and "spectral return" to create contemporary encounters with erased histories, offering frameworks for engaging institutional memory and displacement.

Artist Statement

I work with, and in the spaces between, film & animation, drawing & writing. working with cinematic and theatrical forms I pursue ways narrative is complexly entangled in place.

I am intrigued by the spectral, underpinned by questioning the relationship between representation and presence, seeing this as a catalyst for change.

My practice is rooted in what I understand as ethical custodianship—a responsibility to voices and presences that risk disappearing. Drawing on Olga Tokarczuk's concept of "tender narration," I work with stories that have been silenced, erased, or rendered obsolete: the displaced railway workers of Southern Italy, the vanished bedchamber of Eliza Soane at the Soane Museum, the phantom films of Luigi Pirandello that were never made.

These projects enact what I call "spectral return"—not restoration of the past but new forms of correspondence that allow what has been lost to act in the present. When I speculatively reconstructed Eliza's lost room or facilitated the railway workers' collective declaration over station tannoys, I wasn't recovering history but creating conditions for haunting—letting absent voices speak through contemporary forms.

Personal encounter with illness has been a catalyst for my methods, when crisis reconfigured my relationship to time and place. Confined to a hospital bed, I discovered how narrative becomes a form of survival, how stories can reorganise geography when forward motion stops. The experience taught me that rupture itself can be generative—a site where new forms of attention and care might emerge.

My films, animations, drawings and writing are acts of conjuring - invocations of a sort - in which I create highly scripted narratives that enable melancholic but wry, corporeal and often intense encounters with overlooked and forgotten histories and imagined futures.

Through what I call "temporal dwelling," these works explore how we might be at home in time rather than place—sustaining relationships with absence without seeking resolution. They position storytelling as both ethical practice and survival strategy, positioning artistic practice as a politics of unfinishedness: a way of conjuring what has slipped away and letting it act in the present. In our moment of ecological and social precarity, when many forms of continuity are breaking down, I am interested in how narrative can become a fragile but persistent form of belonging.

———————————————-

Anne-Marie has recently had a solo exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum London, Dear Friend, I can no Longer Hear Your Voice, produced by Animate Projects, UK. Dear Friend was presented at the Koffler Center for the Arts, Toronto, Canada, in 2023.

She has also regularly exhibited internationally at galleries and museums such as: FRAC Bretagne, (France), Yantai Contemporary Art Museum, China, Exeter Phoenix Galley, Exeter, UK), Camberwell Space, University of the Arts London, Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum (Norway), Palm Springs Art Museum, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim (The Netherlands), Apex Art (New York), Communication Space Školská 28, (Prague, Czech Republic), Sagacho bis (Tokyo), Galerie der Künstler (Munich), and Spacex Gallery (Exeter).  Publications that feature her work include The Drawing Book, edited by Tania Kovats (Black Dog Publishing, 2006).  She received the Derek Hill Scholarship in Drawing at British School at Rome, 2012.  She has done several residencies and collaborative projects in Soviet Union, Czech Republic, and Romania, including an International Artist in Residence award with the Centre for Contemporary Art Prague (2004-5).  During the 1990's she one of a number of a group of artists responsible for the London based artist-run Cubitt Gallery.  Anne-Marie still occasionally curates exhibitions and projects, most recently in Norway, with Lars Sture & Kjetil Berge for the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum in western Norway.  She was educated at Middlesex University & the Royal College of Art and lives in London, where she is a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. 

Radio Interview with Brainard Carey, Yale Radio series on Artists, curators and more, February 2016

Below is a link to a interview with Brainard Carey for Yale Radio, for his series on interviews with Artists, Curators and more. "Lives of the most Excellent Artists, Architects, Curators, Critics, Theorists and more, like Vasari's book updated. (Interviews with artists and others about practice and lifestyle from Yale University radio WYBCX)". A link to the series can be reached here.

A link to Brainard Carey's Yale Radio series on iTunes can be reached here: http://tinyurl.com/how75jd