Post-Grad Portraits: Celine Marchbank

Could you tell us about your current work?

I am currently just returning to my practice after an 18 months break, as I had my first baby. I say a break, but I did manage to publish a new book in that time! I’ve spent time promoting the book A Stranger in my Mother’s Kitchen. This book is an exploration of the grieving process told through my mother’s cooking history and legacy using images, writing and archival recipes. The book was published by Dewi Lewis and designed by Loose Joints. It was nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photography last year. So that has kept me rather busy through my maternity ‘break’.

Now I am getting back into my studio, I’m having a rethink about my work, revisiting some ideas I had stopped before the baby, reflecting on recent experiences and generally spending time thinking about what direction I want to go in. I’m enjoying writing again, something I did lots of for my two last books. I’m not sure what the next body of work will be, but there are a couple of idea bubbling away.

Your photobook Tulip, the story about the last year of your mother’s life, was published in 2016 and met with widespread acclaim. What was the process like working on something so deeply personal, and how did it feel to have such a positive response to an undoubtedly beautiful ode to your mother?

I started this body of work while on the MA course. Just before I started the course my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I nearly dropped out of the course due to this but decided to stay after her and my tutor’s encouragement. I started making work with her, but not with an intention to make a body work with it. I photographed our time together at home and our time in the hospital. I didn’t think I wanted to do anything with the images at first, but the work grew. My mother was very enthusiastic about it, she’d always say “have you taken enough images today, what shall we do tomorrow?” The work at first was about her, but then it became about me. My mother was dying and I didn’t know how to make any sense of it. I didn’t know what to do. Making images helped me understand in some way or at least help share the feelings somehow. This work became my final project in the MA, I was my mum’s full time carer at that time so there also wasn’t really another option of me doing anything else. My mother died in October 2010, two months before the end of the MA. I started to show the work, I wanted to make it into a book, so I made a book dummy and started showing it to people. It was nominated for the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2011 and shown at the Arles photography festival on a ginormous outdoor screen which freaked me out. I didn’t feel ok people that didn’t know me or my mother seeing it. So I kind of stopped doing much with it, it was just too soon. It wasn’t until 2015 when I started to talk to the publisher Dewi Lewis about my new work that we started to discuss Tulip, and decided to publish that first.

The book was very well received, and that is of course really nice, who doesn’t enjoy seeing their work received well. However, that isn’t why I published it. I published it as I felt it’s an important story to tell and to contribute to the conversation round death. There are now many many published works around death and grief, which is encouraging to see, but ten years ago there wasn’t.

Your work looks at the quiet details of domesticity, with a particular interest in home, family and community. How does it feel to photograph these intimate moments, and what drew you to this in the first place?

My mother brought me my first camera when I was 7, a polaroid. I would take hundreds of photographs around my house; objects on tables, details on a shelve, my mother sleeping. For some reason I have always been interested in the ‘mundane’ landscape around me. I’ve never been impressed with photographs of glamorous locations etc, to me it shows little skill. What I find fascinating is if someone shows me something I see every day but shows something different about it. That fascinates me. The beauty of photography for me is in the details and how they tell a bigger picture.

How did your course and time at UAL shape your relationship to your practice and photography now?

Everything I experienced through that year, the course and my mother’s illness and death, shaped my relationship with my practice. It completely changed my view on photography and what it is and what it can do. For me photography stopped being about ‘taking pictures of things’, and became about expression; expressing an idea, an emotion, working the world out.

The course shaped me vastly, it changed my life. I am still close friends with many people who did the course, both in my same year and years before and after. It launched me into the industry and gave me the skills to navigate the industry (which I had little idea about before!).

You’re now teaching at LCC, how does it feel to go from being a student to now teaching at the same University?

I started teaching at LCC on the MA course during the Covid lockdown, so the first year was rather strange with all the restrictions and rules, I found it really challenging. The second year I really enjoyed, it was wonderful being in the same classrooms I had once been in as a student, I feel a lot of love for that course for what it did for me. The students are all so committed to the subject and their practice, and it’s really lovely to be a part of that process. I took a break from teaching when I had my baby, I haven’t returned to LCC so far but would love to one day.

What’s been your most challenging hurdle you’ve faced as a photographer? And what advice do you have to current students at UAL when it comes to embarking on their career?

Making a living out of it! It’s really difficult to make a decent living out of solely photography, I think people need to be more honest about this. There is a reason so many photographers teach at universities, of course we love teaching but we also need a steady income. Freelance photography is difficult, especially within the documentary or art areas. Commercial photography is a different case, I did commercial photography for a while which pays really well, but I got to a point where I was bored of taking photos, it became a bit meaningless. So I decided to move more into teaching and away from freelance work. So now I mainly do my own work, along with commissions and other things such as mentoring and running workshops. You need to find the right balance that suits you.

Finally, we’d love to hear about any memories you have about your time at UAL!

I so enjoyed my year at UAL. With the stressful situation that were going on at home for me during that time, coming into LCC was a joyous experience. I loved just being in the LCC building, I’d spend hours in the library looking through photobooks. I think because I had not been in education since I had graduated back in 2002 I really wanted to get the most out of it, I was so excited to be a student again and in a subject that I really loved. Our course was full of different interesting types of characters, all there because of their love of photography. We all bonded well and made a real effort to do lots of social things together, it was fun. Some of my closest friends now are people I met on the course.

Related Links

• Discover more of Celine's work
• Follow Celine on Instagram
• You can find Celine's photobooks Tulip and A Stranger in my Mother's Kitchen at various UAL Libraries
• Find out more about Post-Grad Community's 10 Year Anniversary
• Have you heard about our Family Heirloom project?

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