Handle with Care

Handle With Care is a landmark six-year retrospective by leading contemporary British artist Claire Luxton. With both striking photography and poetry, the book presents a sophisticated interrogation of identity, beauty, and authorship, where the artist acts as both architect and inhabitant. By subverting the historical male gaze, Luxton steps from the position of the observed to the observer. Her hyperreal, painterly images challenge passive feminine archetypes found in classical art, transforming the female body into a powerful vehicle for self-authored storytelling and uncompromising feminist agency.



Spanning self-portraiture and verse, Handle With Care is a retrospective of Claire Luxtons multidisciplinary practice, six years in the making. Each photographic composition is the result of intensive solitary labor: handmaking intricate props, staging elaborate sets, and digitally layering the results to construct an immersive visual world entirely of her own making. It is a world in which she as subject exists in the evocative space between beauty and discomfort. And yet a world she has chosen for her own image, lending a self-authored confidence to the apparently passive muses. Rather than simply replicating the classic feminine beauty of Renaissance paintings, Luxton inhabits historical tropes to interrogate who defines, depicts, and embodies beauty. The resulting volume unleashes the explosive power of deconstructing imposed femininity, offering a definitive exploration of vulnerability, control, and the modern female form.