Klare England
loves the sun in all its phases ...
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A Nottingham
Trent art student with a passion for eclipses has visited the ends
of the earth to take photos for her degree show.
Klare England,
a 25-year-old from Suffolk who is finishing her BA in contemporary
art at Nottingham Trent University, spent weeks in Madagascar last
year to capture the eclipse.
She even hired
a fishing boat to reach a remote island so she could have the best
view of the setting sun. She also had to cross shark-infested water
to get there.
And she spent
four days on the island, with 18 other eclipse-chasers, avoiding
a plague of rats.
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| The Madagascar
eclipse in all its glory |
After the eclipse,
she travelled the country to see its famous rainforest and stunning
scenery.
At one village
, but luckily a band of spear-carrying
local tribesmen arrived to drive away the robbers.
"Many in the
group were screaming and crying when the men fired their guns. It
was like the Wild West," she said.
Klare paid for
some of the trip with money from the Geoff Ball Travel award and
used her digital pictures to create an installation-art exhibit
at the Djanogly Art Gallery before Easter.
She used a slide
projector and a dozen net screens to show the images from different
perspective.
Klare says she
got hooked on eclipses in 1993 when she was visiting South America
at age 17.
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| The remote
island where Claire camped for days to capture the eclipse |
"It completely
blew my mind and was an incredible sensation, both visually and
emotionally it was simply spectacular," she said.
She then travelled
to India in 1995 and after that Columbia and Venezuela in 1998 to
experience more eclipses.
"It鈥檚 an addiction,
but a healthy one that gets you to remote places."
Her final degree
show will involve an interactive show at a local pub, the Golden
Fleece, which has a 50-foot shaft down to the original cellar.
She doesn鈥檛 want
to give away the surprise element, but it will involve 13 people
descending the shaft to encounter a box, some recycled oil, and
more of her original images.
And Klare hasn鈥檛
finished eclipse-chasing yet -- she plans to travel to Australia
in December to experience her first one in that country.
See
more of Klare's photographs >>>>
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