Clare Cooper

I am a figurative oil painter currently exploring themes of intimacy, isolation, and the rifts in between. My paintings typically depict close relationships situated in a domestic setting with a compositional focus on intimate body language. My recent work investigates the boundaries between the 'insider' and the 'outsider'.

I’m interested in the relationship between impasto and indexicality, and my exploration of gesture and brushstrokes functions to indicate my presence in paintings that I am physically absent from, and by extension, examines my relationship to the people I depict. Recently, this idea has expanded to my use of dramatic lighting and shadows. Most of my paintings depict a pair of people, but since Me and Beth depicts just one figure, I have used my shadow as a form of indexicality to represent myself and my presence more explicitly on the canvas. In this way, I am interested in using portraiture not to capture objective reality, but my subjective experience and my version of the people I paint. 

I use ‘the gaze’ as a device to explore the hierarchies of viewing. For me, the gaze engages the audience in an active rather than passive relationship with the paintings -  the spectator becomes the spectated, the viewer becomes the viewed. By combining the comfortable body language of the sitters with their direct and confrontational expressions, I have positioned the viewer as an intruder in the private scene depicted. From an installation perspective, positioning the paintings opposite each other enables them to gaze at one another, and builds a theatrical scene that the audience is interrupting.

I have been experimenting with using extracts of dialogue, in the form of transcripts, to accompany the paintings. These transcripts plunge the viewer in medias res as if they were interrupting an ongoing conversation. Elements of the dialogue are censored and hidden in the scroll, thus excluding the audience from the conversation and reinforcing their outsider status.  Overall, this installation revels in the contradiction of inviting in an unwelcome guest.