A BODY OF WORK
Three new books celebrate the life of late Toronto artist Claire Wilks,
She was known for drawing the human body — Toronto artist Claire Wilks died of cancer in January, 2017. Her work is featured in three new books: We Left
The Camp Singing, by Janice Kulyk Keefer with artwork by Wilks; Facets of Eros, by David Sobelman and What The
Hand Sees, edited by her husband Barry Callaghan and in an exhibition at the Sheldon Rose Gallery. Here, a taste of how she was regarded from renowned Canadian author and Toronto poet laureate Anne Michaels who contributed this essay to What The Hand Sees. Here
Claire’s subject was the body: not just desire, but consciousness. Not just the fact of mortality, but death as a state of being, another state of consciousness, a place.
It was not her task to turn away. She moved forward into the truth of things.
In her sculpture An Upheaval of the Dead, the dead are a collective body, embracing in recognition, in solace, in familiarity, in assertion, in communion, in a kind of transcendence. For who but the dead can comfort the dead?
Painters use light to express transcen- dence. But instead she went straight into the earth to find her transcendence there. Her wax figures rise from the ground like a soul from a body.
Claire’s very last drawings were made several months before she died, during two weeks of intense work, when she knew her time had run out. These figures are enclosed in a deep inwardness. All of these faces express a purpose and an acceptance, and an almost feral silence and concentration. Dying requires attention and these figures are preparing themselves, sunk in that purposeful inner focus.
Her subject was always the body, with almost an astonishment at what we are capable of feeling. For her figures, drawn and sculpted, to experience fully is to understand. She expressed the body in full passion, her figures knowing everything we are made for, and everything that is at stake. To face experience squarely is to respect what the body needs to know.
Her figures and faces are in the middle of experiencing and comprehending. Her art bears witness to these moments of bodily comprehension. Everything about her last drawings expresses an inner state. All knowledge, even the most abstract, comes from the body, and everything she made expresses this inescapable truth.
The body is a limit, a threshold. All her life, in her art, Claire explored that threshold we are defined by, the limit that defines us, and the physical place and moment we perceive to the full. Through our skin and in our thought.
How we perceive death, what we imagine, what we intuit, what our instinct and imagination tell us, where our soul leads us, is not separate from what death is.
All through her working life as an artist, Claire acknowledged the place death has in our bodies.
When we look at Claire’s work, we can imagine that the reason for flesh is inseparable from what lies beyond it, and what lies beyond is the reason for flesh. Without the body there is no consciousness, no death. The limit of the body is the very way we comprehend there is something beyond that limit – and that is the reason for the framing in her drawings, why her bodies are enclosed, barely fitting into a circumscribed space. In her sculpture, that limit is the flesh itself, where it meets the air, the space around it.
Without a limit, there is no beyond. Limit is the proof of the beyond.
The figures in An Upheaval of the Dead are moving in a new element. They are not alone. There is a kind of rapture in this rupture. When Claire made this sculpture, she did not yet know she was ill.
When Claire faced her own death, she did not need to reach for a new vocabulary. In that outpouring of drawings over her last few months, we see the confirmation of the vision of a lifetime. This vision has been fully realized. And that is why we feel her presence so close to us when we look at those drawings. She is near. She is here.
Excerpted from Claire Wilks: What the Hand Sees, edited by Barry Callaghan. Copyright 2018, Exile Editions. Reprinted with permission of Exile Editions.