ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST CURATOR
Clare Carswell MA(RCA) is a British/Irish artist based in Oxford, England. She works in the intersections between performance, drawing and writing. She exhibits and performs in galleries, museums and for platform events in the UK and internationally.
Her practice explores shifts in identity within a lived female experience shaped by cultural and familial expectations, unconscious and chosen influences. Recent works passage the artist into her post Brexit identity as an Irish citizen, in constructed tableaux of mementoes and landscapes. They are offered as imagined traces of displacement, of a ceaseless familial yearning for a homeland left abruptly but never lived in. Works are informed by the collective memories of the artist's migrant family and of the wider Irish diaspora.
Her visual language is rooted in a fine art sensibility and feminist performative strategies, asserting her bodily presence, migrating between the planned and the spontaneous. Inventive actions place her in the work through writing, performative action, embodied drawings, the sung or spoken voice. Residual marks, traces of intent and action, are left in spaces, the archive or the memory - a self styled but probably unreliable narrative of her existence.
Clare works with Peta Lloyd as performance duo GIDDY STICKS, exploring absurdity and ageing.
She synergises her art practice with curation in the COU COU curatorial project. She leads the BIDDY project which showcases the work of older women artists through exhibition and performance events.
Clare trained at Norwich School of Art and the Royal College of Art London. She is studying for a Masters by Research Degree at Oxford Brookes University. She is researching the impact of lived experience and ageing on the chronology and content of older women artists’ works, and archives.