ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST CURATOR
Clare Carswell MA(RCA), (b. London, 1959), is a British Irish artist working with performance & drawing to make works for the gallery, museum, platform events and in the public space. She has performed in a bathroom, cathedral, chateau, at a birthday party, in gardens and in the street. Clare uses strategies of play, comedy and improvisation, song and spoken word in vibrant works that are often participatory and open to situation and moment. Rooted in a fine art sensibility and feminist strategies, they use object, gesture and the drawn mark to make works that are interactive and that migrate between the planned and the spontaneous.
Recent works TA-TA and WEEZ 2024, WONKY_NEE & WONKY STRANGE 2023, LOLL 2022, SMILE KEEP SMILING & SUGAR SUGAR 2018, hover between ward round and slapstick. They invoke the trials, and the comedy, of inhabiting an ageing body, the need to test endurance and strength, as well as maintain connection with others through acts of imagination.
Works such as FÀILTE and PARTY GIRLS 2017, draw on memories of family loss and personal grief as well as the memory of their ever present sorrow at their enforced migration from Ireland last century.
Contrived acts of arrival, welcome and temporary settlement reach into the embodied memories of the artist's family and the Irish diaspora, and ponder the need and the struggle for assimilation and for identification with place and culture.
Clare seeks to engage with audience through participatory works to invoke personal and collective, culturally resonant memories and to propose new and inventive ways of sharing our stories and imaginings.
Clare works with artist Peta Lloyd as GIDDY STICKS a dynamic and anarchic performance duo proposing the absurd as performative strategy. OLD GOBS and CELERY were performed in Oxford and Frome Somerset in 2023.
Clare curates the work of other artists through the COU COU project, working since 2012 to curate exhibitions, platform performance art events, artist residencies & youth arts projects. COU COU especially supports women artists over fifty to be productive and acquire new skills, to collaborate and grow their networks, and to share their work through the exhibitions and performance events of the BIDDY project.
Clare was born in London and studied for a BA(Hons) in Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and an MA (Fine Art Printmaking) from The Royal College of Art London. She currently works from her studio in the Vale of White Horse near to Oxford making drawings and teaching small group art classes.