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 both 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 life.
In my abstract works, deconstruction and reassembly become a formal rhythm with which to connect my own history to the physical world around me. I work with materials and images drawn from daily life: broken plates, velvet salvaged from my mother’s bedroom, cement chosen for its cold tactility. In my work Fractured Love (2025), I address my relationship with my mother through shards of plates she gifted me and interwoven fragments of our writing. I follow rhythms in color and texture as a path out of darkness. The meaning of breakage remains open.
The poet Anne Carson wrote: “what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error / the willful creation of error / the deliberate break and complication of mistakes / out of which may arise / unexpectedness.” Similarly, my work looks for the mistakes and ruptures in nature and life, breaks in the world that become a way to continually seek the unknown.
Bio:
Charlotte Gould is a New York-based artist whose multimedia works across photography, sculpture, and works on paper use fracture and fragmentation as a formal language. In 2024, Gould began formal studies in photography under Janette Beckman and Silvio Wolf at the School of Visual Arts, and is currently mentored by documentary photographer Marissa Roth. In addition to her studio practice, Gould is a running coach and the founder of Mothers Across America, an award-winning nonprofit running organization dedicated to supporting women and girls through goal-based running programs.
