ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST CURATOR
Clare Carswell MA(RCA) is a British/Irish artist based in Oxford, England.
She works in the intersections between performance, drawing and writing. She exhibits and performs in galleries, museums and for platform events in
the UK and internationally.
Her practice charts shifts in her identity as a woman shaped by cultural, familal, economic and other influences. Drawings, fiction writing & performative action, are proposed as responses to discerned absences in the content and chronology of works in her archive. Acknowledging the lived experiences that account for these gaps, they are made visible through imaginative retellings rather than verisimilitude.
Her visual language is rooted in a fine art sensibility and feminist strategies, forcibly asserting her bodily presence, migrating between the planned and the spontaneous through gesture, drawing,sung or spoken voice. Strategies of play and improvisation shape vibrant works responding to audience and place. Residual marks, traces of intent and action, are left in spaces, the archive or the memory, as a self styled, but unreliable, narrative of her existence.
Works such as SHIM, for HELP! at Hundred Years Gallery London 2026, WONKY STRANGE and TA-TA, for Women’s World at Pandora Gallery Berlin 2023 & 24, WEEZ for BOLD Oxford 2024, hover between ward round and slapstick, invoking the trials and comedy, of inhabiting an ageing body and the need to test its endurance and strength, and to use it in acts of fierce imagination.
Clare works with Peta Lloyd as performance duo GIDDY STICKS. Their works promote absurdity as a life strategy, preferably with pudding !
She synergises her practice and curation through the COU COU project, curating platform performance art events and exhibitions. She leads the BIDDY project that challenges lazy societal stereotypes of the marginalised and invisible older woman, showcasing the art and performance of women artists over fifty.
Clare studied at Norwich School of Art and the Royal College of Art London.
She is currently studying for a Masters by Research Degree (MRes) at Oxford Brookes University. Her research subject is 'Adaptive Practice: Performance, ageing and longevity in women artists’ practice'.