Chloe Dewe Mathews

Artist Chloe Dewe Mathews will be presenting her work and career

Chloe Dewe Mathews is best known for her ambitious documentary projects. She received international recognition for Shot at Dawn, inspired by the histories of soldiers executed by firing squad by their own sides during the First World War. 

At Photo Meet, she will be presenting two projects that were published last year: Caspian: the Elements and In Search of Frankenstein.

Chloe began the Caspian project by hitchhiking across the region in 2010. She returned repeatedly over the next five years, seeking out stories that raised questions about the human relationship with natural resources in a much-coveted territory. Aside from their economic value, she found that materials like oil, gas, uranium and water played an essential role in the mystical, artistic, religious and therapeutic aspects of life.

For one of her most recent projects, In Search of Frankenstein, Chloe explored the alpine landscape that inspired Mary Shelley's classic novel, Frankenstein. Beneath the snow-covered mountains she found a network of subterranean bunkers, built in the 1960s to shelter the entire population of Switzerland in the event of a nuclear disaster. In Search of Frankenstein juxtaposes images of these underground spaces with vast melting glaciers, offering parallels between Shelley’s prophetic socio-environmental concerns and the anxieties of our time.  

Chloe Dewe Mathews is a photographic artist based in St Leonards on Sea. Her work is internationally recognized, exhibiting at Tate Modern, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. It has been published in newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, Sunday Times, Harpers and Le Monde. She has received the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award, the Royal Photographic Society Vic Odden Award and the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Chloe’s first monograph, Shot at Dawn, was published by Ivorypress in 2014. In 2018, she published In Search of Frankenstein with Kodoji Press and Caspian: The Elements with Aperture / Peabody Press.