Associate Q&As with Clare Carswell

Introduction

I am a mid career British/Irish artist. I trained in Fine Art Printmaking in the 1980’s. My first degree was from Norwich School of Art and my MA from the Royal College of Art. 

I make performance work and use strategies of play, comedy and improvisation in works that are open to situation and moment. Rooted in a fine art sensibility and feminist strategies, they use object, gesture and the drawn mark to make works that are interactive and that migrate between the planned and the spontaneous. I often seek to engage with audience to invoke personal or collective culturally resonant memories and to propose new and inventive ways of sharing our stories and imaginings. 

In works such as SMILE KEEP SMILING 2018 & SUGAR SUGAR 2018, works that exist somewhere between public health warnings and faux burlesque, I examined the trials, and the comedy, of maintaining an ageing body. During the pandemic I worked at home making performances to camera in nature and the domestic space as well as artists books. These works come from a more reflective practice I am developing that leads to felt sense images that are vibrant, energetic and spontaneous. They celebrate the creative impulse as life force and identification with a chosen place as home.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently making a photo book called BONE 2021 which sees my rather painful feet become gloriously painted adventuring beings that stride out to all sorts of spaces and situations for me to discover them anew.

During lockdown I was unable to do live performance work and as most people did, I relied on Zoom to enable me to hold conversations with others and to share my work. I was privileged to work several times with Inês Amado Harris in Lisbon and paula roush in London on their CREiA, creative attentive studio for mindful art practice, workshops online. 

Participating in CREiA with artists such as Annie Rapstoff and Peta Lloyd, helped me to develop a more intuitive and spontaneous practice, exciting images are still emerging. 

The workshops also introduced me to artist book making and publishing and the books I made earlier this year, such as LAUNCH 2021, are intended as portals to unwitnessed actions and performances to camera and offer a physical experience of them to the viewer. I plan to incorporate the experiencing of my books into future performance works.

Where do you work?

I have a studio at the bottom of my garden where I make my own work. I curate the work of other artists and run events through my non-profit curatorial project COU COU, at Overlay Studio on the edge of Charlbury looking over the Evenlode valley. www.coucoucuration.com  It is a quirky, inspiring and historic space (a converted pre-war pig shed that housed Italian prisoners of war) that I have rented since 2009 and a lot of artists from many places have done great work there through my residency and exhibition programmes. Everyone who works at the studios falls in love with the place, it is very special. 

What are your other work commitments?

I curate the work of other artists through a curatorial project, COU COU. I have hosted residencies for artists from the UK and internationally since 2012, and curated performance art platforms and events such as talks and screenings.  

A recent project is the DWELL residency programme for women artists over fifty. It is a flexible, non building based residency that is individually tailored to support older women artists. It acknowledges and makes space for their other commitments and responsibilities, perhaps as earners, parents, spouses or in caring for elderly relatives. The residency is self led with no required outcome. It shapes to fit the artist in their life, rather than they having to fit in with our agenda or schedule. The residency can be of any length and the studios at COOU COU are available to them if they need them,  otherwise I support them through regular dialogue about their work in their own studio or home, and by introducing them to other artists. 

I designed the DWELL programme to be remote and flexible as it seemed that older women artists were less able because of work, health or familial responsibilities, to step out of their lives to go and spend extended periods away, as the traditional residency model often demands. Many of them have done residencies earlier in their careers and don’t feel the need now to be uprooted in order to develop their work. There seemed no reason though why they ought not be able to benefit, for an agreed period, from mentoring through a regular dialogue with myself and other artists about their work, even if done at home. If they so wish an outcome such as an exhibition or open studio can happen too but this is not required. This idea could not have been more prescient as COVID stopped us all in our tracks in March 2020.

The first DWELL residency artist, Rhiannon Evans, started her residency at COU COU just after she finished one at OVADA in the summer of 2019. Rhiannon was at the end of a productive few weeks working in the studios when lockdown happened. 

We had planned for her end of residency exhibition to be in the autumn of 2020 but we decided to extend her residency by a year as our work was interrupted and other commitments demanded our attention. The relaxed nature of the residency worked well for her and I was able to keep contact with her and to invite her to join the online CREiA workshops with artists in Lisbon and London as well as from Oxfordshire at the end of 2020 and early in 2021. 

Rhiannon’s end of residency exhibition, Re-FORM, has just opened at COU COU and runs into October. It is wonderful to see how she has evolved her practice whilst working through such a difficult time.  

I am working with Peta Lloyd on her DWELL residency and her end of residency exhibition will be at COU COU early summer next year. 

I am about to put out the call for other women artists to apply to do a DWELL residency. It will be exciting to see who applies.

How does your Associate membership benefit you?

Like many artists I spend a lot of time alone with my work and the associate membership gives me access to the creative community working around me in Oxford and surrounds. I enjoy looking at the work of artists who I may not otherwise get to meet. 

My artist profile on the website means that my work reaches other artists too. Developing relationships with others through OVADA leads to networking and sometimes to collaboration which I welcome. 

I first worked with OVADA in 2008, when it was at Gloucester Green, in the exhibition, GIFT, with artists from The Ideas Exchange, curated by Astrid Bowron. 

I am very pleased to be asked to be the next OAFA and will enjoy trawling my archives to share some of my work on the OVADA Instagram, thank you for asking me.

What are you hoping to achieve over the next year?

Funnily enough I do want to step away from my own busy life to experience residencies ! I was a single Mum and was not free or able to afford to go and do an overseas residency earlier in my career. I will welcome the opportunity to go somewhere other to immerse myself in my work. 

I am hoping to visit Iceland first, where I exhibited in Reykjavik in 1990 not long after I graduated from the RCA. When I went there it was with my first husband and our fifteen month old daughter and I was five months pregnant with our second child. I was enchanted by the landscape and I want to go back there alone and stay on a volcano by a lake, in a hut with no electricity, and immerse myself in days and nights of sunshine, the smell of sulphur and creaking lava beneath me. 

I also want to spend time in Ireland working in the land of my ancestors, as I am a child of the Irish diaspora. There is research I want to do there into the experience of the forced migration my family endured fleeing the troubles in the 1920’s, and the subsequent sense of loss of homeland and displacement that I grew up with. 

It seems an island nation beginning with I is where I want to be ! 

Tell us a little bit about the work of an artist or arts organisation/ collective that you find inspiring

Veronica Cordova de la Rosa is an exciting and courageous artist and curator, originally from Mexico.

https://veronicacordovadelarosa.com/

Whilst completing her doctorate at Oxford Brookes, and with artist Peta Lloyd, she established the art platform Live Art and Performance Group (LAPER) in 2015. 

https://liveartandperformancegroup-blog.tumblr.com/

They have organised numerous performance art meetings and three International Performance Art Festivals in Oxford : ‘Elastic’ in 2017, ‘Squash & Stretch’ in 2018 and ‘Lead’ in 2019.

There had been occasional performance art platform events in Oxford over the years, Breathing Form in 1993, VAIN in 2002 but they were few. Through her curatorial work Veronica has made a significant contribution to the live art scene in Oxford and many of us have benefited from participation in these showcase events and in the collective experience of working together.

After the hiatus of Covid, Veronica is re-launching LAPER, now an independent research group with no affiliation to any art education institution. 

LAPER has been awarded the Oxford Council Council Culture Fund support for the forthcoming academic year 2021-2022 and Veronica is fundraising in order to offer more opportunities and visibility to performance artists in Oxford and to those from BIPOC and under represented groups. 

Veronica is tireless in her commitment to the arts despite the demands of work that is not always in the arts sector, and in having to apply for her right to remain working as a professional artist and cultural entrepreneur in the UK. We are lucky that she chooses to be here.

Describe the last time you felt inspired

I was very moved this summer by the exhibition ‘This Living Hand : Edmund de Waal presents Henry Moore’ at the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire. It was my first visit to a gallery since COVID and that alone was inspiring enough, but to have the opportunity to touch, to hold hands in effect, with the wonderful and totemic sculptures that Moore carved was a powerful experience. It has inspired me to seek out other works that offer sensory and immersive moments that connect us to our own and others’ humanity and corporeal inhabitance. I am looking forward to experiencing  the Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’ at the Tate. I plan to explore these aspects myself in future performance works. 

What is your opinion of the current art scene in Oxford?

I think it is in good shape despite the interruption of the pandemic. When I moved to Oxford from London thirty years ago there were few if any exhibition spaces for artists in the city. That began to change as groups of artists came together to make collective studio and showing spaces in old buildings and this has been vital for the continuing existence of an arts community in Oxford. 

The Oxford Printmakers continues to be a wonderful resource for artists. Diana Bell and Kevin Slingsby starting Magdalen Road Studios, Jan Crombie at The Workshop Studios made a huge contribution to the working lives of artists and a sense of an art community in Oxford. 

I benefited by having studios in both places in the early noughties and I gained so much from working alongside others and participating in a community of arts practitioners. It motivated me to invite other artists to come and make work in my own studio space when I established it in 2009.

OVADA is evolving and is always energetic in reaching out to artists and offering visibility to their work as well as fabulous courses. Magdalen Road Studios is undergoing development as is Fusion and Ark-T. The Old Fire Station has been a welcome addition to the city with a good exhibition space and great curation. The Jam Factory offer affordable wall space to rent in the centre. Veronica Cordova de la Rosa is re-launching LAPER.

It definitely feels like an exciting time for the visual arts in Oxford and the county, as projects and galleries that support the artists who live and work here are thriving, networks are growing and new collaborations are happening. It is good to see younger practitioners and those from marginalised groups becoming decision makers and shaping the policy and direction of organisations.

Funding for all the arts is insufficient and constantly under threat and that must be challenged. But the lack of it does not stop artists from doing what they do, although it can limit ambition and scale. The arts ought not to have to rely on volunteers to function but it often does as artists take time from their own work to create opportunities for others, often financing projects themselves. In so doing they share their experience and collaborate to maintain a welcoming and supportive arts community, vital to the enabling and encouragement of artists be they emerging or established. 

If it weren’t for the vision, energy and hours of contribution from many such generous artists, Oxford would not have the vibrant visual art scene that it has.

How do you feel the arts benefit society?

We have always learned about our forebears through the art they left us. The arts in all forms give visibility to the things humans care about, they bear witness and they enable us to find our own voice or they say them on our behalf.

It is impossible to engage with art in any form and not feel stimulated and inspired to grow beyond our own borders and to think about other people and cultures or to connect with issues that matter and where change is needed. 

It is just desperate seeing the cuts that are being made to the arts and the devaluing of art education from early years to degree study. This is short sighted and perverse given that governments take pride in promoting our cultural and heritage assets on the world stage. They need to fund, nurture and treasure the people that make them more.

Artists, writers, musicians, film makers prove in every depression or crisis how resilient they are and now is no exception. We have a vital contribution to make through our work and by moving through the world as the creative souls that we are. We can reach others in very special encounters, we are lucky that we can do and we deserve support as we do.

A glimmer of hope is that I think that many people during the pandemic were stiller as life slowed and found that they had time to start to make things. They experienced the pleasure and power of creativity in enriching their life, in giving new expression to their feelings and in staying well and hopeful, which we must be.  

© Clare Carswell / September 2021

Join us live at 11am on Friday 19th November, for Clare's In Conversation with previous OAFA Annie Rapstoff. Email engagment@ovada.org.uk by 4pm on Thursday 18th November with the heading 'OAFA In Conversation' to receive the link and join the conversation.