The plastic medium Claire uses is integral to her practice and informs her works.
The artist’s plastic medium informs Claire’s unique style for organic, biomorphic forms. It can dictate and change the outcome of a piece or the direction of the medium when sculpting and setting feels more suitable and fitting to the final piece’s overall appearance. Claire’s twisting sculptures were often compared to my fellow artist Dale Chihuly, a pioneer of large-scale glass sculptures who is also inspired by nature to create his biomorphic forms.
The artist found this special plastic through serendipity in an electronics store with her parents.
Every medium comes with its own set of processes and techniques. The only rules were that if you heated it, it would melt and set back at room temperature.
This led to the artist experimenting with the various ways she could use and push the medium to its limits to make her art.
Having to be quick in reaction analysing as she works, problem-solving instantaneously and knowing that each time she heats a piece, adding another section of a sculpture working with the heated segment could ruin or affect the whole piece if the last piece is not correct in appearance or balance.
Like a glass blower, the artist’s process of working is very much the same, but unlike glass, it can be moulded by hand comfortably and which instantly cools into its final form without its fragility., Watching the artist creating her sculptures has also been compared to watching a sugar sculptor work.
The artist cannot use gloves or specific tools or surfaces, opting for a cold marble or glass surface next to running water to sculpt her pieces.
Moving between fire and heat sources to submerge in cold water or cooled with ice.
Over the last few years, Claire has not only come to learn what this medium can do but has also helped teach this to others, from being invited to various schools around Yorkshire for their resistant materials classes and art classes to help others express their ideas in this medium and going to one of the UK’s major factories that produce this medium who were only using the medium for roller-skate wheels and custom chemotherapy masks at that stage.
This medium for the artist was a cross between sculpting and sketching, allowing for quick idea changes and amalgamations of ideas not restricted to one design and weeks of casting and seeing a replica at the end.
The artist does not like to make the same thing twice; each sculpture is a unique and one-of-a-kind creation, informed by its creation and very hard to replicate identically.
The forms of Claire’s sculptures arrive through procedures and processes of their creation, of which the choice of material is the most significant. Thus, the properties inherent to a specific material dictate how the work is conceived and executed and how it looks.
Claire prefers handmade to machine-made connecting with the piece as it is made intuitively.
Though my medium has properties like that used in 3d printers, it is this direct connection of brain and idea to hand and medium for intuitive sculpting that Feels more personal, and the final piece is somehow closer to that intangible thought. Claire acts as a conduit for the creation of the piece, and each sculpture retains handmade qualities, not uninspiringly immaculate like a work created by 3D printers or computers, feeling this to be too rigid and impersonally when replicating organic works.
Sci-art
Claire tries to absorb as much scientific information as possible before creating her abstracted sculptural works.
From her cosmology drawings inspired by deep space and theories of the known universe to the microscopic networks of billions of firing synapses in the brain responsible for thought and memories.
From listening to podcasts from the Bertarelli foundation, reading research papers by leading neuropsychologists, and studying philosophy and famous thought experiments (one of the artist’s favourites, which they read when they were just ten years old and helped spark the artist’s early love of neurology and philosophy before it influenced their art was the famous Descartes Brain in a vat, thought experiment “Cognito, ergo sum”). These concepts may help the artist to illuminate and visually express what the mind is and the mysterious network of thoughts beyond what we currently can see.
By creating work connecting to the cutting-edge frontier of medical research and science, Claire hopes that her works may offer new perspectives of visualising data and ideas uniquely and exploring the boundaries of art and science.
The artist’s plastic medium informs Claire’s unique style for organic, biomorphic forms. It can dictate and change the outcome of a piece or the direction of the medium when sculpting and setting feels more suitable and fitting to the final piece’s overall appearance. Claire’s twisting sculptures were often compared to my fellow artist Dale Chihuly, a pioneer of large-scale glass sculptures who is also inspired by nature to create his biomorphic forms.
The artist found this special plastic through serendipity in an electronics store with her parents.
Every medium comes with its own set of processes and techniques. The only rules were that if you heated it, it would melt and set back at room temperature.
This led to the artist experimenting with the various ways she could use and push the medium to its limits to make her art.
Having to be quick in reaction analysing as she works, problem-solving instantaneously and knowing that each time she heats a piece, adding another section of a sculpture working with the heated segment could ruin or affect the whole piece if the last piece is not correct in appearance or balance.
Like a glass blower, the artist’s process of working is very much the same, but unlike glass, it can be moulded by hand comfortably and which instantly cools into its final form without its fragility., Watching the artist creating her sculptures has also been compared to watching a sugar sculptor work.
The artist cannot use gloves or specific tools or surfaces, opting for a cold marble or glass surface next to running water to sculpt her pieces.
Moving between fire and heat sources to submerge in cold water or cooled with ice.
Over the last few years, Claire has not only come to learn what this medium can do but has also helped teach this to others, from being invited to various schools around Yorkshire for their resistant materials classes and art classes to help others express their ideas in this medium and going to one of the UK’s major factories that produce this medium who were only using the medium for roller-skate wheels and custom chemotherapy masks at that stage.
This medium for the artist was a cross between sculpting and sketching, allowing for quick idea changes and amalgamations of ideas not restricted to one design and weeks of casting and seeing a replica at the end.
The artist does not like to make the same thing twice; each sculpture is a unique and one-of-a-kind creation, informed by its creation and very hard to replicate identically.
The forms of Claire’s sculptures arrive through procedures and processes of their creation, of which the choice of material is the most significant. Thus, the properties inherent to a specific material dictate how the work is conceived and executed and how it looks.
Claire prefers handmade to machine-made connecting with the piece as it is made intuitively.
Though my medium has properties like that used in 3d printers, it is this direct connection of brain and idea to hand and medium for intuitive sculpting that Feels more personal, and the final piece is somehow closer to that intangible thought. Claire acts as a conduit for the creation of the piece, and each sculpture retains handmade qualities, not uninspiringly immaculate like a work created by 3D printers or computers, feeling this to be too rigid and impersonally when replicating organic works.
Sci-art
Claire tries to absorb as much scientific information as possible before creating her abstracted sculptural works.
From her cosmology drawings inspired by deep space and theories of the known universe to the microscopic networks of billions of firing synapses in the brain responsible for thought and memories.
From listening to podcasts from the Bertarelli foundation, reading research papers by leading neuropsychologists, and studying philosophy and famous thought experiments (one of the artist’s favourites, which they read when they were just ten years old and helped spark the artist’s early love of neurology and philosophy before it influenced their art was the famous Descartes Brain in a vat, thought experiment “Cognito, ergo sum”). These concepts may help the artist to illuminate and visually express what the mind is and the mysterious network of thoughts beyond what we currently can see.
By creating work connecting to the cutting-edge frontier of medical research and science, Claire hopes that her works may offer new perspectives of visualising data and ideas uniquely and exploring the boundaries of art and science.