Clare Petherick

Artist statement

I am primarily a drawing based artist. When I begin a new body of work I spend a period of time researching and developing a completely new way of working. Its almost like doing research for a film, as what unfolds is like a journey or story that takes place on location.

Mixed Metaphors are a new series of 15 works drawn at random locations around London. Everyday scenes and objects are given weight and depth by being suspended on a blackened background. Individually each piece has an emotive quality, as a whole they suggest a puzzle or mystery that holds no clues. The ambiguity is intentional, making the work open to interpretation.

The negative black and white quality of the work is influenced by a long-standing fascination with 19th century plate photography. In particular Edweard Muybridge’s American Landscapes with their crisp realism almost seem surreal in the way that they represent a time and place that has vanished. Early photography has a type of sharpness that makes the subject tangible and yet distant at the same time. Its this quality and displacement that I try to reflect in my work, an interpretation of our inner selves and complex thought processes, clarity, ambiguity, contradiction.

A very strong influence on my work was a book I read some years ago by Jenni Diski. Skating to Antarctica describes the author’s compulsion for white spaces, and leads her to seek the ultimate white space at the bottom of the world. Landscape as a state of mind inspired me to produce the Winter drawings which were both short listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2004 and selected for the Bloomberg Contemporaries in 2005.

The Untitled drawings where created on a Devon beach, almost moonscape in appearance one of the drawings was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2010.