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COLLECTIONS

SHEEPIFY

The work with sheep went deep uplifting the sheep to a new cultural high, celebrating the sheep’s deep commitment to the hu-woman and marvelling at their continued wealth of inspiration as a highly authentic creature. Sensitive and intelligent, cognitively engaged and a steady nature of being content with what is, are surely grounds to alert human interest?

My multiple day walks gave close encounters and I observed their notable and noble characters. The white sheep, the golden and the black appeared alone or in flocks, seemingly bereft without a shepherdess. Their ability to move between their individuality and in their collectives is remarkable and something for the hu-woman to prescribe to!

Global goings-on brought individual/collective musings to the fore with the suggestion that collective compliance makes the task of peace and progress more amenable in competing geo-political spheres. The docility of the sheep, with its purity, simplicity, vulnerability and sense of justice marked out enviable territory for this work. They presented as those who inherently, yet quietly, know their worth. And yet, an environmental burden had been laid on sheep or they were ridiculed for their herd mentality.

That aside, sheep metaphor has been striking. The metaphorical use can be aligned with the increasing acceptance of education as a progression of boxes to be ticked rather than a valuable opportunity for the open discussion of thought and idea. Through this work, I am reminded that the sheep is ever so worthy of conversation and hence, discussion, as I attempted to amplify a sense of wonder in the world, in gentle and thoughtful hopefulness.

I worked in oil paint to develop abstract landscapes, lands I had walked through, and placed within each, a sheep design I had created in Iceland.

WALKING TO DISSOLVE MARGINS

Walking brought immeasurable content.

I had walked long distance trails through Iceland, Spain, England and Australia. In walking, I entered a space beyond words and began to research the philosophy of walking, forming the term ‘walkscapes’ to describe the effect of the land on the body as one walks it. As the world turned with Covid, I thought how important it is, as humans, to make small exchanges in an everyday kind of way. I came to wonder how these small efforts in relating deserved slow, deliberative attentiveness every day, as indeed, painting and remembering do.

Out walking, I could feel places to the point of stillness, while moving. I kept coming alive as I related with the land, and it with, around and through me, I felt the need to ‘tread lightly’ through each land and likewise with each other. The integrity of the wild was being allowed to slowly grow back.

At this time, I valued intimate spaces and paid homage to the everyday in real time. Then humans started moving again.

‘

‘the wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us and human culture will pass, given time, of which there is sufficiency.

The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas.

The sand will drift into our business parks, as it drifted into the brochs of the Iron Age. …… Our roads will lapse into the land.’

Robert MacFarlane, WILD PLACES, 2015

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ICELAND

Deep Frieze

Tectonic plates kiss

Countries hiss

And the gap widens.

Madeline Clare, 2018

I went to Iceland on a three month art residency. Here, I came to understand the role of repetition and rhythm for cellular unity. I developed an even deeper love of walking long distance. I walked across volcanoes, down gullies, up snowdrifts, alongside indeterminate structures and around fishing sheds. I recounted and rehashed and unforgettably, danced the tango in Reykjavik.

The art practice cultivated deep threads of association between land and body. I was perceiving limitations to the freedoms I had thus far been permitted, and I was being thrown a line to an ancient past of geological might. No longer powerful or fast within my biology, the clarity of simplicity gave renewal. Inspired by the soft expansiveness of a landscape with rhythmic feminine undertones and a fiery underbelly, its resonance kindled a love affair with rocks and shape. I felt the intensity of being a grown woman in Iceland’s voluptuous volcanic landscape, an anchor for wellness. I stumbled across terrifying beauty, in awe of ice masses and their reverent shapes; and a lit sky that followed me on my night’s walk, whipping up a magnetic frenzy. I felt wonder.

As I alternately walked in the mountains and created work, I developed abstract landscapes with watercolour, ink and pen; oil painting on tissue paper and began to write more extensively, as practice. In the written word, it was as if I was creating a democracy of land and beauty, where humans, animals, plants and inanimate objects were of equal value. In this way, feeling the essence of being human.

WANDERING UTERUS

This art project looked at the sensitive and vulnerable embodiment of the maternal feminine and her response to landscape. I explored the enigmatic, sensual and elusive qualities of the uterus and its potential to symbolise home.

In a performative photographic narrative, I used the feminine body (my own) in two juxtaposed geographies of England and Australia. To understand the ambiguity of the feminine aesthetic, that articulates the feminine as it is experienced, I set the subjective images within an objective staged framework of photography and print. I distorted, displaced, merged and emerged in and out of the space of photographic representation to leave indeterminate traces of the innate language of motility.

Through embedded cyclical rhythm the disruptive and creative capacity of the uterus could be defined, and the capabilities of the maternal feminine to affect and steer relationship positively and adversely, became apparent. It was about the unheard and unspoken language of women who relate intuitively. I presented poetic imagery using the subjective ‘feminine aesthetic’ to privilege the non-linear. This was harnessed by the medium and fell gently outside of the discourse of the current organisational systems. In retrospect, societal discourses were collapsing and I felt it in my bones.

I discovered then that the naturally evolving maternal matrix was ever so alive and resilient to the systems she had grown into and been apart of for five decades. I was uncovering a jouissance, free from a dominant, ordered, logical, masculine language.

I worked with a method of printmaking using solvent transfer to give a soft, effusive tone with a sustainable landing. And the repetition of print gave the artwork rhythm, the photography gave the ‘instances‘.

‘Each instant of time forks into a new distribution of before and after,

elements that are selected or repeated from the past, and those affirmed of the future,

shift, kaleidoscope into new configurations.

She morphs.’

Madeline Clare, 2017

NOTE: A ‘feminine aesthetic’ is to be vulnerably moving the edges, haunting the boundaries, to emerge and retreat, to build and to unravel, to be present and absent, to edge out of the frame and to be in it. To infinitely distend and envelope, she is ‘elsewhere’ in the sense thather world is made up of affects, traits and movements free from over-coding. Unbound by time that serves to link memories and hopes together in a single cohesive story.

SECRET GEOGRAPHIES

Secret Geographies was about exploring trails of patterning: genetic, environmental and nurturance.

In 2016, I was experiencing a pervasive sense of imminent radical global dissatisfaction and felt an expanded appetite for the rediscovery of remote secret places and spaces. I was using the surface of the tongue, a vital and receptive muscular organ, which sits on the threshold between the external and inner world of the body mind continuum, to underpin the creative work.

I drew upon holistic modalities of tongue observation as I completed a diploma in Ayurveda to identify patterns of geography. Individual, and high-functioning in language and communication the tongue presents the health of the whole organism. I discovered the enigmatic, sensual and elusive qualities of the tongue, collecting a range of tongue prints and analysing them digitally. Through the subtle art of drawing and layered print-making – screen print, monoprint, digital and etching – I then delivered a sensitive visual of inner corporeal beauty and fragility.

This culminated in Secret Geographies, which I furthered in subsequent projects.

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