ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST CURATOR
Clare Carswell is a British/Irish visual artist based in Oxford, England. She works in the intersections between performance, drawing, writing and moving image.
Her practice explores shifts in identity within a lived female experience shaped by cultural expectations, unconscious and chosen influences. Inventive actions place her in the work through performative action and embodied drawings, the sung or spoken voice. Residual drawn marks, traces of intent and action, are left in rooms or in the memory, assuring a self styled but ultimately unreliable narrative of her existence.
Recent works conjure playful responses to the comedy and struggle of inhabiting an older body through vibrant and often comedic performance works. She works with Peta Lloyd as performance duo GIDDY STICKS, exploring the absurd.
Current 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 yearning for a homeland left abruptly and never lived in. Works are informed by the collective memories of the artist's family and the wider Irish diaspora.
Her research method is informed by the relationship between the imagination, articulation and making. She has particular interest in collaboration and the participatory through dialogue, interaction and reciprocity.
Her visual language is rooted in a fine art sensibility and feminist strategies, asserting her bodily presence, migrating between the planned and the spontaneous. Strategies of welcome, play and improvisation shape colourful and connective works responding to audience, place and situation.
She synergises her own practice and curation in the COU COU project. The BIDDY project showcases the work of older women artists through exhibition and performance events in the UK and overseas.
Carswell studied at Norwich School of Art and the Royal College of Art London. She exhibits and performs in galleries, museums and for platform events in the UK and internationally.