Life on Venus III | The Organic, Timed Auction

"Using painting and drawing, my work explores colour, shape and scale.

Inspired by both current affairs and art historical references I use the figure and its abstraction, as a medium for questioning issues of invisibility: both in contemporary society and in the patriarchally dominated western canon of art history.

In art history; where women often appear as allegorical or mythological figures, rather than real people, as muses or models not artists, and in contemporary issues of injustice for example; the #metoo campaign, lack of recognition or opportunity, the plight of forgotten members of society during the Covid Pandemic, I use the property of paint to create marks and texture that depend as much on its unpredictability as on its physical manipulation.

The image is a catalyst to how my work evolves in paint: it may be figurative or at its border with abstraction; increasingly depending on colour and the application of paint itself to physically convey mood, form and meaning inside the pictorial space." - Clare Hawkes, 2020