| These paintings celebrate contested space. They describe places that are simultaneously intimate and desolate. These are locations devoid of any particular focus, and yet are of possible significance—places where someone might be conceived and, as likely, someone might expire. My interest in depicting such ambiguous spaces, so often hidden or overlooked, is that they represent places where wider interests and concerns including popular and folk traditions, the pagan and the orthodox, and what we understand as urban and as rural, can be seen to overlap. |  |
Clare Woods’ work was on view at Buchmann Galerie, Berlin in April.
Clare Woods, Little Scar, 2008. Enamel and oil on aluminum, 183 x 127 cm. Courtesy of Buchmann Galerie.
These paintings celebrate contested space. They describe places that are simultaneously intimate and desolate. These are locations devoid of any particular focus, and yet are of possible significance—places where someone might be conceived and, as likely, someone might expire. My interest in depicting such ambiguous spaces, so often hidden or overlooked, is that they represent places where wider interests and concerns including popular and folk traditions, the pagan and the orthodox, and what we understand as urban and as rural, can be seen to overlap.
The works adhere to the long British tradition of pastoral landscape painting, somehow managing to conjure two contradictory moments of the English countryside—a mythical, verdant, Gothic, romantic past, and one of mutant overgrowth and post-industrial abandon.
The images are predominantly abstract, and yet within the endless possible readings of the forms that they contain, they are somehow psychologically charged. Like Hermann Rorschach’s ink blots, they are uncanny—familiar, and yet somehow sinister.
Just as the language I employ in my work hovers between representation and abstraction, between precision and accident, I am interested in how my paintings become sculptural in the sense that the viewer cannot absorb the surface in one take. Instead, they are forced to move in order to fully see the work, and, as if looking at a polished bronze, they are drawn towards a surface that reflects them and others around them.
All of the works are based on night photographs that I have taken in the British landscape. Relying on their emotive qualities, they inspire me to use paint in formally inventive and arresting ways that will allow me to take the viewer to places that are loaded, seductive, and haunting. I want to advance a long tradition that continues to have much to say about our condition as people who are now largely urbanized, and yet evermore fascinated and affected by representations of the land.
