CLAMP is honored to current Flowers Drink the River, a solo exhibition by Fall 2024 featured artist, Pia Paulina Guilmoth—her first with the gallery. On this deeply private physique of labor, Guilmoth paperwork the primary two years of her gender transition whereas dwelling in a rural, predominantly right-wing city in Maine. Her large-format images replicate each magnificence and terror in a world the place queer existence will be at turns each euphoric and deeply perilous. Haunting nocturnes replete with moths, snakes, and owls, are animated by uncooked, animistic rituals, representing Guilmoth’s seek for magnificence, sanctuary, and resistance amid the wild landscapes and intimate relationships that outline her life.
Spanning themes of transformation, belonging, and defiance, Flowers Drink the River is an ode to trans girls, queer kinship, and working-class survival within the backwoods of central Maine. Guilmoth’s images reject straightforward categorization—mud-drenched our bodies intertwine at nighttime of night time, spider silk drifts throughout glowing landscapes, and nocturnal creatures transfer by means of the body like quiet witnesses. A burning home rages within the distance with a peaceful white horse seemingly unawares. Mates piss from tree branches like a heat summer season rain. These images inhabit the area between land and physique, pleasure and risk, inviting viewers right into a world the place boundaries are blurred, and survival is a essential act of creation.
Guilmoth’s photographic observe is rooted in collaboration—each together with her human topics and the pure world. She constructs delicate sculptures from spiderwebs, flowers, and different discovered supplies, then waits because the atmosphere intervenes, letting wind, water, and light-weight reshape her compositions. This meditative method extends to her relationship with the animals she images, incomes their belief over weeks and months earlier than capturing their presence on movie.
“Every night time for every week in August, I’d sit within the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard, coated in Scent Killer Gold, sporting a ghillie swimsuit, holding a tray filled with crushed apples in a single hand and a 30-foot makeshift shutter launch cable hooked up to my 4 × 5 digicam within the different,” Guilmoth recollects. “The identical household of deer would get extra comfy with my presence every night time. Ultimately, they had been consuming the ripe fruit from my arms. The next Tuesday, I’d have my first HRT session. I used to be protecting it a secret, understanding there was no approach I may safely transition on this place, but additionally no approach I may conceal my altering physique over the next months and years.”
Guilmoth’s use of large-format pictures is each a technical and emotional alternative, emphasizing endurance, precision, and bodily engagement with the medium. “I’ve all the time embraced slowness in my life,” Guilmoth states. “Each within the place I reside and the way in which I aspire to be. Artwork and being with folks I like are the issues that enable me to actually exist in a second.” The intricate strategy of establishing every shot, from constructing belief with wild creatures to manipulating pure parts, displays the broader themes of her work: resilience, adaptation, and the seek for magnificence in unlikely locations.
At its core, Flowers Drink the River challenges the conventions of documentary pictures. Moderately than approaching her topics as an outsider, Guilmoth images her personal neighborhood—trans and queer folks navigating life in a area that usually denies their existence. The result’s a physique of labor that resists voyeurism, as a substitute providing an intimate, deeply felt portrait of chosen household, survival, and pleasure. “Resistance for me is saying: ‘You possibly can try to take all the things from me—healthcare, security, reasonably priced housing—however you possibly can’t take away my pleasure and the flexibility to search out magnificence in my life,’” she explains.
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the identical title printed by Stanley Barker. All photos courtesy of and owned by Pia Paulina Guilmoth.
