Claudia Clare Ceramics
Statement: I'm a feminist artist who makes painterly pots, both large and small, in full colour and monchrome. I trained as a painter but transferred to pots because I found the turning surface sympathetic to an unfolding visual narrative. Pots are our museum pieces, our archaeological and documentary evidence. Their human, cultural and historic associations connect well to the work I do interpreting women’s histories and contemporary lives. Pots also break and can be rebuilt. It is a compelling metaphor for the human experience of trauma and survival and one I deploy particularly in my feminist work.
Materials: I use exclusive ceramic materials: a dark brown clay mix, coloured slips, sgraffito line, and clear glaze, sometimes with added enamel colour and lustre. The shattered pots are rebuilt using conservation grade adhesive and Gold, Platinum, or Aluminium leaf is used to gild the edges of shards to frame the internal images or emphasise a broken line.
News in brief:
EXHIBITIONS
Inspired at Ruup & Form, 7th Mar-5th Apr includes 4 vases from The Garden, collection, 2024.
A Spirit Inside which includes Remembering Atefeh,is touring. It will be at Compton Verney from 21st Mar-1st Sept,2024.
Vice & Virtue, 2024 at Ruup & Form, June/July 2024, tbc.
RECENT COVERAGE:
Studio International: Beth Williamson reviews A Spirit Inside, at The Lightbox, Woking, UK, including a lovely mention of Remembering Atefeh.
Artforum: Claire Bishop tours 3 Warsaw Museums in Summer, 2023, and reviews the state of the art and curating in socio-political terms. Her artice, 'Capital Offenses, Cultural Whiplash in Warsaw' includes a 'mixed' response to my exhibition, 'Feminist Satire, No Safe Spaces.' The March 2024 edition includes my response to this article with a reaction from Professor Bishop.
Kolektyw Labrys - Lesbian Feminist Collective, Warsaw, reviewed Feminist Satire, No Safe Spaces in Polish.
The Critic featured an in depth interview with Jo Bartosch: 'Breaking Taboos with Clay.'
TV Republika has made an excellent video of me talking about the show and some of the pots. 15 mins - View here.
Katie Treggiden's Broken, (Ludion 2023,) subtitled 'Mending and repair in a throwaway world,' includes a chapter on social justice activism with a beautiful section on 'And the Door Opened,' my project with women@thewell'
'The Stuff of Dreams and Nightmares' Critic Corinna Lotz reviews my recent show, Fired, (2022,) with Frances Aviva Blane, on the Real Democracy Movement site,
FEMINISM
No Men in Women's Prisons is my mug design for Keep Prisons Single Sex now available to buy here for £15.00. Commissioned to remember the bicentenary of the Gaols act 1823 pioneered by social reformer ElizabethFry.
Filia Commission Jug, Sink the Sex Trade, shown at Cardiff conference, October 2022, has posters and cards to buy via the Filia Shop on my 'artist' page.
Feminist Satire, No Safe Spaces,' my exhibition in Warsaw, 2023, has now closed. You can view the pots satirising religious fundamentalism here, the sex trade, here, and Gender theory, here . You can also read Jo Bartosch's lively and well informed introduction here, on the Ujazdowski Castle website.
Remembering Atefeh, (2011-13) has been acquired by the Women's Art Collection, Cambridge.
IN OTHER NEWS:
Read here: the result of the legal action I took against the Craft Potter's Association and University of the Arts, London when they withdrew my invitation to speak at Ceramic Art London 2022. Includes the statement from Levin's, who represented me, and links to press coverage.
The Daily Mail published: 'Now It's Ordinary Women Like Us Being Cancelled,' by Jill Foster, which includes a section on an ordinary, everyday, potter - me.
AND FINALLY:
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