Winner (Drawing) 2017 Waverley Art Prize!

For Claire Primrose the continuing impact of place on her creative imagination is paramount. Her works are made in a studio in the industrial area of Queanbeyan near Canberra, far removed from the sources that have excited her imaginative sensibilities. They are the result of felt experiences that have stayed with her, that have become active ingredients in her (very) living memory. Her works are compilations of the visual data of place, her memory of the physical topographies of place and her experience (physical, emotional, intellectual and aesthetic) of place. Her drawings are poetic paeans to the complex amalgam that is the individual’s confrontation with the land. Primrose is conscious of the space between reality and the experience of reality and her constant search for the right means to express that complex yet seductive tension gives creative and aesthetic energy to her art.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work finds inspiration in the direct linking of immediate locations with my technique of making a drawing or painting; transporting a real environment into the making of an artistic space evocative of its original and my own identities.

My practice recreates surfaces, textures and colours evocative of particular places;  each work attempts to recollect layers of the ‘place’ by both memory and specific gatherings.  Work begins outside incorporating elements of my surroundings, taking gatherings of soils, botanical detritus, sampling ‘indigenous’ waters; to be incorporated physically within my work.  Fragments of immediate inspiration form frameworks.

The interplay between my medium (spray enamel) and these natural collected elements make the resulting paintings a series of possibilities and potentials.  Often paint and specimen react; water, soils and paints produce oxidation blooms, mimicking natural acts, offering aesthetic visions of deeper environmental events.

These processes are hard to control; rather my practice embraces the ‘surprise’ element, it encourages ‘happy accidents’ and it is these effects that I am most interested in pursuing, as revelations of both my identity and that of the intimately entwined environments painted.

Who: Claire Primrose

Where: Stanley Street Gallery

When: 9th August – 2nd September

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