Claire SALKELD














My art attempts to formalise a peace amidst a chaos. I use all-over compositions that overwhelm their space with an abundance in colour and form. I am trying to form an alliance with the excess of stimulus presented to a modern human. While examining the extent we have distanced ourselves from our environment. To how displaced we are as animals. And trying to find a place for primitivism in this world.
I create oil paintings from the abstract terrain of drips and colourful washes. In a pareidolic way, I transform these ambiguities into solid figurations. Using a mix of recognisable and obscure shapes, which fuse together to form a kaleidoscopic landscape. I also play with perspective and will work on a painting from all angles, in a bid to conceive an incomprehensible painting or object. These palimpsest-like paintings are layered extensively, hiding many untold stories. Only sections reveal points of the system at work. Like a holographic snapshot, made in an attempt to map out the curiosities of the universe.
I also use non-traditional modes of sculpture, currently working with pipe-cleaners creating complex bundles of shapes. The pipe-cleaner sculptures dense cores, that hide an intricate internal network, and although each center, invisible to the naked eye, holds its seminal place in holding this whole system together. Each anchor feeds off the next, being formed in spontaneous response to the other.