Articles in the book are authored by Barry Schwabsky and Simon Wallis
Publisher Buchhandlung Walther Kong GmbH + C
Publishing Date 2006 Hardcover
Texts are in English
ISBN 978-3-8656014-4-5
Published to accompany the exhibition; Clare Woods: Deaf Man’s House at Chisenhale Gallery, London. This book contains essays by the American art critic, Barry Schwabsky and Simon Wallis; Director of Chisenhale Gallery. For this exhibition Woods’ has produced three large-scale paintings, nine feet high and between twenty four and thirty six feet long, using household gloss and oil paint on aluminum. These newly commissioned paintings fill the gallery walls so that the viewer becomes physically enveloped in the reflective surfaces of the works. Just as Woods’ visual language shifts between representation and abstraction, precision and accident, she is also interested in how her paintings might take on sculptural qualities when realised at this scale, so that viewers cannot perceive the surface of the work in one take. The English countryside is a significant aspect of Clare Woods’ paintings and offers a fascinatingly malleable subject allowing deeply embedded primal stories, desires and experiences to unfold. These are often derived from the photographs Woods takes of rural life, including supernaturally charged places, sometimes obscured by snow or nightfall. Her locations, devoid of any particular focus, are symbolic landscapes, humanized through palpable emotions and unseen presences. Clare Woods is fascinated by the accumulated intensity of the past in many places in Britain. Her symbolic landscapes are humanised through palpable emotions and unseen presences enmeshed within them. They cast a dark hue on any conciliatory visions of nature, ninting at our struggle to control and tame it. In her work Woods uses the innate fear and awe we have of nature and our highly developed canacitv to proiect our desires ento it.