Claudia Carr: Opened Ground

Claudia Carr is known for her ambiguous paintings; the artist works from life but her paintings border on abstraction.

In this new body of work, the artist has worked from a restricted palette of black, white and yellow ochre, extracting as much chromatic activity as possible and exploring the tensions of working within such parameters. They are about the interaction of colours, rather than colour itself.

A long time in production, the act of looking at the same thing for hours on end builds a uniquely intense relationship between the observer and the observed. Possibly it is this protracted and intimate engagement that pushes the artist’s vision beyond the real. The vagaries of perception are as much her subject as the objects themselves; the slippage between what you see and what is actually there.

Opened Ground, the title of the show, is a recognition of the resonance she finds in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Her deep connection with the landscape, both as physical experience and metaphorical motif, plays out through not only the objects she paints (mostly collected whilst out walking) but in the atmosphere that permeates the paintings. Sitting somewhere between animate and inanimate, the otherworldliness of the suspended and weightless forms is heightened by manipulations of scale. We are not sure if we are in or above ground, looking through air or water.