Claire Wright

Automatism and Loving Traces

Claire is a multidisciplinary artist and musician in her third year of the studio art program. Her current approach to image making is extremely gestural and meditative, relying on rapid intuitive movements of the arm/hand that often mirror the typical pacing of writing syntactic language or childlike scribbling. She is particularly interested in the concept of surrealist automatism, a technique that refers to bypassing the analytic mind and accessing the unconscious as a part of the creative process. This process of creation involves ritualistic preparation, engagement with the self, and converses with the experience of presence. What has begun to emerge through this practice is a translation of the momentous occasion of creating something, resulting in chance imagery and development of a sort of language/series of symbology of her own. It opens up access to the free flowing, non-judgemental source of creativity, granting the sort of catharsis one may imagine a child experiences when approaching artistic investigation. She has created an art practice void of expectation and pressure, and full of presence and play.

There is an emphasis on line and gesture, with emerging connections to consciousness, catharsis, the body, language, memory, and psychedelia. It is a release of fear and shame, and an invitation to engage with the awareness of the self in a healing space. She is particularly interested in opening up to the realm of performance work and embodying work through physical action, and does this by using the body as a canvas and sculptural tool. There is an allowance for whatever happens to come out of a session, sort of like artistic improvisation.

As a musician, she finds naturally occurring parallels between the music and art she creates, with improvisation beings one of the keys. Language, writing, composition, and the peculiar territory of auditory resonance and sound are areas of interest. Merging the music she creates with her art practice is also a direction she’s headed in, and in this exhibition she explores how music affects the unconscious mind during the process of creation.