HIDEAWAY - Solo Exhibition by Clare James
Hideaway is an expression of love for the forest and a communication of Clare’s state as she grapples with the reality of our climate emergency and the relentlessness of daily life.
Artist Clare James is painfully aware that we can’t hide from the climate crisis – images of despair and catastrophe haunt her consciousness, particularly in the quiet hours of each night.
Clare visits the forest daily: either in her body as she walks, sits, and observes the play of nature; or in her imagination, to counter the images that plague her mind, knowing that as we go about our lives, devastation is happening in real time, right now, and now, and now. These forest visits are her therapy, and also her road into the source of all that stirs her curiosity and imagination.
Hideaway is a collection of works embodying this knowing of the forest as both balm and treasure. While Clare goes to wild places to learn and discover, she also goes there to rest and breathe, consciously replacing her experience of despair with peace and beauty and vastness. It is in this place that she can steady herself with thoughts of recovery, replenishment, activism and return. It requires steady effort.
The varied artworks in the exhibition convey Clare’s relationship with the forest as a sanctuary, a place that holds her, us, and all of the wild things within its complex and miraculous ecology. Hideaway is made up of watercolour paintings, of imagined and true landscapes, all with shelters nestled within, a video installation documenting beauty and its unravelling, installations of ceramic and mixed-media sculptures, and a Clare-sized, cocoon/cubby made from her home garden prunings.
In this collection, Clare has combined her feelings of despair and grief alongside her great hope to convey the strength of nature’s intelligence and the fragility of its balance. Hideaway is an expression of love for the forest and a communication of Clare’s state as she grapples with the reality of our climate emergency and the relentlessness of daily life.
Exhibition dates:
opened 5 August
NOW EXTENDED to 28 November 2021
Artworks Available:
Clare is of course keen for viewers to experience the exhibition in person. However as so many have asked us to, we are now making a limited number of her artworks available online HERE. See and buy them now!
Gallery Hours:
As restrictions ebb and flow, please keep an eye here for updated opening hours. Current hours are:
Temporarily closed, Reopening Saturday 6 November with slightly reduced hours n the short term 11am-3pm. Stay tuned for updates.
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