Friday Focus: Rachael Clewlow
Through painting and printmaking Clewlow has created a visual language that reflects an obsessive desire to map out and document her own experiences of the world. Her work follows a tradition of reductive abstract painting, informed by the aesthetics of cartographic design but shaped by her love of colour.
In an ongoing series of diaries begun in 2003, she makes rigorous and detailed recordings of her everyday movements, minute by minute, measuring time and space. This living archive provides a rich source of data from which Clewlow creates her work. This habitual process is punctuated by performative journeys Clewlow undertakes, often on foot, to explore and respond to the geological heritage of particular locations and landscapes.
Clewlow was born in Middlesbrough in 1984 and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. She received a BA Hons from Newcastle University in 2007. Group shows include, Jubilee, Vane Gallery, Newcastle, 2022, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Painting In The North East Now, NCA, Newcastle, 2022, Gesture to Geometry, Platform A, Middlesbrough, 2022, Curle, The Revelator, Glasgow, 2021, LEGACY – 50 Years of Painting in The Tees Valley, The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, 2019, Bis Repetita Placent, Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans Sartoux, France, 2019, A Foreign Encounter, Galerie Foe, Munich, 2015, :Xenotopia, Gibberd Gallery, Harlow, 2015, Chance Finds Us, MIMA, Middlesbrough, 2014, Tip of the Iceberg, Contemporary Art Society, London, 2013, Walk On, NGCA, Sunderland, touring to various UK galleries, 2013, National Print Biennale, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2007. She was a Prize Winner in the Nationwide Mercury Art Competition, Hospital Gallery, London, 2007. Her work is included in both private and public collections, including The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and Rochdale Arts and Heritage Collection. Solo shows include My Paths Are My Ideas of Imagination, Touchstones, Rochdale and Platfrom A, Middlesbrough, 2018 and Explorer, Northern Print, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
Getting started is the trickiest part. It happens in various ways, generally I'll read an article or get a snippet of information about a place which grabs my attention and makes me want to explore it. I'm really interested in my surroundings and the ever changing landscape, I enjoy recording odd moments and hunting for unique experiences. Historical events which have taken place in an area often pull me in, to see how a place has evolved over years. From these specific geographical contexts I like to construct performative journeys, which then inform my work in painting and print. My works are like documents of this research process.
One of my favourite projects was based in London, looking at the 'protected views' of St.Paul's Cathedral from across the city and how it has affected the architecture and the shape of the city. I walked the city for a week, recording my journeys along the protected sight lines, gathering information to analyse and organise back in the studio.
More recently I've been using photography to document journeys and drawing from these images to create colour palettes to work from. I've found these have freed up my practice and allowed me to concentrate on form and colour. I feel this development has provided a new freedom and space for expression and my work is stronger for it.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
Part of my practice stems from family holidays as a child, we'd drive to the south of France from the North East of England, with few stops in between. I'd spend hours 'collecting' number plates from cars and tracing our journey on a map.
I've also always been a fan of heights and seeing the horizon line. In the first year of my degree I got hold of keys to Greys Monument in Newcastle (a huge statue in the centre of the city, with a winding staircase up to the top). I was making huge photographic panoramas at the time, using several hundred photos per image. I started to wonder how far my eye could actually see from the top, so I mapped out the distance to specific points, firstly using string (this got a bit messy in the city centre), then using a notebook and a pedometer. This is when my documenting really took hold and became an integral part of my practice.
I've been hugely influenced by the work of Bridget Riley, Annie Albers, Josef Albers, Hamish Foulton, Richard Long and undoubtedly by James Hugonin whom I've been an assistant to for 15 years. All of these artists have had a huge influence over the years. Riley was one of the first big influences on me - I encountered her work as a child at a small gallery in Middlesbrough and fell in love with the geometry of her complex works created in simple black and white.
'Reductive abstraction' is a term that has been used to describe your work - a form of language, code and colour that captures human interaction with the world in visual form, can you talk more about this approach?'
I've been heavily influenced by the language of cartography and it's use of colour and shapes to symbolise the world. Pairing down the environment into simple geometric forms, each one colour coded and categorised. Through painting I'm attempting to re-present my experience of the world, often through the nuances of colour, to narrate a journey. I want the viewer to be able to get a sense of the journey and the landscape, not necessarily read the painting as a 'map' but feel the movement and light I experienced during the documenting process. By reducing the visual language of cartography into abstract form I aim to give the viewer the space to narrate their own story of the journey. Ultimately, my paintings are intended to stand alone and can be read as abstract, indeterminate colourfield works - I think they ask the viewer to slow down, look and contemplate them as visual spaces.
It's crucial! I really love drawing with silverpoint on a smooth gesso panel, these materials allow me to execute very fine detail and often very small text. The line drawing is often my favourite part, the pure and elegant structure underpinning a work. My paintings are generally made in Lascaux acrylic paint, due to drying time and technique. I occasionally work with coloured pencil for sketching out ideas, although I find the colour palette somewhat limited as my paintings usually involve many hundreds of individually mixed colours.
It's a tricky one, it's between my trusty Moleskine notebook (I have carried one of these for nearly 20 years) and a 0.05 Unipin fineliner, they're my primary tools. The front of the notebook is used for documenting daily life, the minute by minute recorded journeys. The back of the book is for ideas for works which occasionally spring to mind, some realised and some still evolving. My collection of notebooks is very important - I have exhibited them in the past but really they are just for me.
In 2011 I had a brilliant opportunity to work with Master Print Maker Kip Gresham and The Print Studio, Cambridge. I learnt an awful lot about colour relationships and overlays during this time. While working with him Kip very kindly gave me his copy of Colour by Victoria Finlay, it's such a brilliant book describing the history of colour and invention of paint, I'd recommend it to any artist. The stories behind each colour and the journeys they went on really resonated with me and gave the painting process a new dimension. My paintings often involve the mixing of hundreds of individual colour, understanding the way these colours work and the relationships between them has been imperative to my practice.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?
I'm really pleased to be showing work at ArtShed Glaisdale, throughout August in Swimming Through A Diamond http://www.francescasimonstudio.com/artshed
I'll be showing new work alongside fantastic painters, Trevor Sutton, Francesca Simon and one one of my art heroes, Bridget Riley. It will be a huge privilege to show alongside her. The show is curated by Nick Kennedy, it's a really wonderful exhibition in a beautiful, intimate gallery space, so I hope that people make the journey into the remote North Yorkshire dales to see it. It promises to be quite a unique experience.
I'll also be showing some work in my hometown this September in a vast warehouse space as part of Middlesbrough Art Week, which I'm looking forward to. It's a huge week, with a fantastic programme full of creativity which examines the idea of Measure. https://middlesbroughartweek.com/artist