'Regardless of their beautify, wit and intelligence - Claire Kerr's paintings inflict a sort of apocalyptic melancholy. They are, ultimately, an elegy'. (Hisham Matar)
Claire Kerr (born 1968, Wallsend, UK) lives and works in Dublin. She studied at Magdalen College Oxford, Wimbledon School of Art, London and Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin.
Her paintings, apparently seamless and resolved, in fact feel their tentative way - looking for that enigmatic space where an idea interacts with the tangible and real. Modest in scale, they invite intimacy with a viewer but leave open the question of meaning and interpretation. They are meditative and still - a pause in the everyday - but at the same time playful and good-humoured. Concerned with the fundamental properties of a painted image - surface, depth, context - they also celebrate the idiosyncratic or peculiar, trains of thought at a tangent, an unobtrusive weirdness. They give the impression of precision and fact but make ample use of the fictional and speculative. Along the way towards the emblematic, abstract, or ideal, they embrace the unattainable and the unresolvable, aware that objects and ideas in the cold light of day are subject to the inconvenient details of their existence and to entropy. They often use as their starting point art-historical sources, both distant and recent, to achieve a kind of resonance, merging a sense of the past with a celebration of the contemporary.
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Workshop 2020
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The photograph is quite intimate - taken in a small space - and the women give the impression of being a community or group. Sewing and textile work, even when it was a time-consuming domestic chore, has historically also been a space for creativity and companionship. Here they are making a kind of cutwork not unlike that in the painting Cutwork Design, whether for themselves or for sale is not clear. Is the man showing them how to use the machines? Directing their work? We don't know. Mass-produced sewing machines were revolutionary, within reach of millions by the early 20th Century as they quickly became more affordable. Women were able to mend and sew for their families in a fraction of the time necessary for hand-sewing and with considerably less effort. On the other hand, it is one of the reasons that has been cited for making women more available for work outside the home, work which was then often low-paid and which of course had to be done in addition to domestic work. This image is far from an industrial context, but as a profession, although skilled, sewing of all kinds was and is notoriously low-paid with long hours and poor conditions, even in the developed world. A drawing from a photograph, in particular a portrait, is a kind of homage which for me 'fixes' the image again, almost like an additional step in the developing process in traditional photography. The thousands of strokes seem somehow to unravel the moment in time, stretching it out as the image emerges again on a blank page. It feels poignant to try and capture the expression of an unknown face and strange when, by some extra mark of the pencil, a slightly different expression emerges. I have made the image larger and more high contrast than the original, highlighting the individual faces and increasing the impression of depth and height in the space of the image. I wanted to give these women, for us anonymous, the kind of importance associated with history painting. I wanted them and their work to be taken notice of.This drawing is based on a found photograph of a group of women (and one man), with Singer sewing machines. The machines appear to be model 15-30s with 'Sphinx' decals, produced from 1895 until 1933 although the photograph must be from the end of this period, even a little later. The only text in the original photo, 'Suj Masinas', is Latvian.(Claire Kerr, 2020)
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Lacemaker 2020
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Pattern Book 2019-2020
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Cutwork Design 2020
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Point de France 2020
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Antwerp Lace 2020
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These paintings are reflections on The Lacemaker in the Louvre. As it is one of the paintings for which it is thought Vermeer used some kind of Camera Obscura I have drawn a Magic Lantern slide version I have of it - I always think his paintings look better in black and white as opposed to colour reproduction as they are so tonal.
I was thinking about the link between painting and photography and drawing, but also about the lacemaker's work and therefore of course, 'art' and 'craft'. I read that it could take up to ten hours to make a 3 x 3 cm square of the finest lace. For this project I bought various pieces of lace but the two I eventually used are 17th Century French needle lace and 17th Century Antwerp bobbin lace. Although of course they are not 'museum' quality they are exquisite, historic and were each less than 100 euros, a fraction of the cost of any painting from the time, good or bad - we can naturally exclude Vermeer from the calculation entirely! Lace seems to me particularly akin to drawing and of course in the Netherlands it was intended to be worn on a black background.
The Pattern Book painting is one of the earliest sources of lace and other needlework designs, Les singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts of Federico de Vinciolo published in Paris in 1589 and the Cutwork Design is an adaptation of an anonymous French drawing/watercolour design from the early 20th Century.
(Claire Kerr, 2020)
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Backdrop 2020
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Headlights 2020
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Friedrich Moon 2020
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Eclipse 2020
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Friedrich Moon shows a detail from Caspar David Friedrich’s A Walk at Dusk (early 1830’s) in the Getty Museum, imagined as a small postcard. In Friedrich’s painting a man stands by a megalithic tomb in a winter landscape in an image full of atmosphere: the stillness, subdued tones and the tracery of the branches silhouetted against the sky seem at first to give the painting a rather sombre mood – though one of contemplation, perhaps, rather than melancholy, under the light of the waxing moon with the Evening Star close by. The moon features in many of Friedrich’s works - of which the much-loved versions of Two Men Contemplating the Moon are perhaps the most famous - but there are a number of others including Moonrise over the Sea (1821), Northern Sea in the Moonlight (1823-4), or Deep in the Forest by Moonlight (c.1823). In Friedrich, the moon is a symbol of renewal, but also of the sense of time and space beyond our human scale and there is something uniquely inspiring about the moon: unlike the sun – which we normally cannot look at directly and under which everything is bright, the moon is a focal point and its light gives objects an unfamiliar, other-worldly cast. We often keep postcards as reminders – of something seen, certainly, but also a moment in time, a place, a feeling; it can be something oblique, intangible, difficult to describe which the image then recalls.
The painting is linked to two other images in this series, Eclipse and Headlights. I have echoed Friedrich’s idea of the moon as a constant which links human experience across history, but which also connects our daily lives to something beyond ourselves. Eclipse, based on a found photograph, is inscribed on the back ‘Total eclipse of the sun. Taken by Dick from his office window. August 31st 1932'. The winter trees in Headlights reminded me of those in Friedrich’s painting – lit not by the moon but by a passing car and with the same unearthly light. I took the photograph on which this drawing is based walking from Ravel’s house in Montford l’Amaury to the nearest station at Méré, not realising there was no bus.
(Claire Kerr, 2020)
