Changing landcape of artist’s new work
Acclaimed artist Clare Woods has her latest exhibition, Reality Dimmed, at Coventry’s Mead Gallery. She talks to DAVE FREAK about how she’s using a different format for these works
IT was the creation of large landscape-inspired paintings that made Clare Woods’ name in the art world. But her latest work, currently on show at Coventry’s Mead Gallery, signals a new direction for the acclaimed artist. Initially studying to be a sculptor, Woods shifted her focus to painting during her MA at Goldsmiths’ (the famed art department of the University of London). Yet she’s retained a sculptural approach to her work, treating her paintings as “objects” rather than simple flat surfaces.
Inspired by the landscape, and in particular the rolling hills and vistas around her Herefordshire home on the English/ Welsh border, her paintings are sizable, featuring swathes of glossy bright colours applied onto aluminium. Though based on her own photographs, her landscape images don’t present recognisable scenes, as the swirling textures and abstract expressionistic drips of 2010’s Lost Heap demonstrate.
Part of the University Of Warwick’s own art collection, it was Lost Heap that led to Clare’s Mead exhibition, yet as she observes: “The works you’ll see in the gallery today are very, very different in their format and their material.”
While several of the paintings in the Reality Dimmed exhibition, such as An Arctic Breakfast or the green and yellow English Murder, could (in passing) be mistaken as landscape-related, other images feature identifiable elements: there’s a bed in Short Bad Day, a chair in The Last Word, while The Dementor is clearly a male torso.
“I’m starting to use a lot of found imagery, mainly black and white... which allows an area for development for colour,” says Clare of the step change in her work.
“When you’re actually in a place, you smell a place, and you know what it feels like, you know what the colours are, it’s very hard to detract yourself from that or detach from the experience you’ve had. Whereas a lot of found imagery I’m using is black and white... I don’t know how big (the objects in the pictures) are, what they look like, what they smell like, what they feel like; it’s a very different way of working with the source material.
“I’ve been collecting imagery for a long time, found imagery, photographs of newspapers, internet, etc,” she continues. “I started collecting a lot of newspaper imagery around September 11 – that’s when I really started collecting imagery of horror, I guess. Horrors that were happening in our time. But not all of the images are horrific, some are just simple.”
With the change in source imagery has also come a change in the way Clare approaches the actual painting.
“This time last year it would take me three months to make a large painting, and some of the works in the exhibition were made in one day!” she says, though adds that the entire process – from her initial idea to eventual completion – can still take a while. “It’s almost like the time is spent thinking or pacing around the panel, or mixing or remixing the colours. It’s almost like the preparation time and thinking time is much greater, but the actual execution time is much shorter.” ●●Clare Woods: Reality Dimmed continues at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, University of Warwick, until Saturday, March 10. Open Mon-Sat, 12pm-9pm; Sun, Feb 18, 12pm-9pm and Sun, February 25, 10am-5pm. Admission free. Details: www.warwickartscentre.co.uk