Tag: Clare Woods

Clare Woods: Bridging Abstraction and Figuration with Fluid Mark-Making

Clare Woods, a sculptor turned painter, creates vibrant and visceral artworks that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration. Influenced by artists like Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth, she challenges traditional genres such as landscape, portraiture, and still life, exploring themes of beauty, mortality, and loss.

Woods draws inspiration from a vast archive of found and personal photographs, using instinctive brushstrokes to defamiliarize her source imagery. Working on gessoed aluminum, she combines oil and resin, allowing the paint to flow and adapting color through deliberate brush movements.

Her titles, chosen intuitively from a rich archive of quotations, aim to evoke emotional responses in viewers, offering an alternative entry point into her work. Described as “an inheritor of the Surrealist baton,” Woods identifies and interprets unconscious associations in paint, as noted by Simon Martin in an essay for her solo exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in 2016.

Born in Southampton in 1972, Woods now lives and works in Hereford. Elected a Royal Academician in 2022, she holds a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from Bath School of Art and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College. Notable solo exhibitions include venues like CCA Museum, Mallorca (2023), Serlachius Museum, Finland (2022), and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre (2018).

Woods has left her mark globally, with commissioned works for the London 2012 Olympic Park and Aarhus VIA University College, Denmark. In 2016, Art/Books published her first monograph featuring texts by Michael Bracewell, Rebecca Daniels, Jennifer Higgie, and Simon Martin.

Her artwork is housed in major public collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, USA; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; and The Hepworth Wakefield, UK. Keep an eye out for upcoming solo exhibitions at Norrtälje Kunsthal, Sweden (2024), and Towner Eastbourne, UK (2026).

Clare Woods: A transformative artist weaving emotion, form, and history in vibrant strokes.