Hideaway

2021 - Solo exhibition at YAVA Gallery - Healesville, Vic

Artist Clare James is painfully aware that we can’t hide from the climate crisis – images of despair and catastrophe haunt her consciousness, particularly in those quiet hours at night.

Clare visits the forest daily: either in her body as she walks, sits, and observes the play of nature; or in her imagination, to counter the images that plague her mind, knowing that as we go about our lives, devastation is happening in real time, right now, and now, and now. These forest visits are her therapy, and also her road into the source of all that stirs her curiosity and imagination.

Hideaway is a collection of works embodying this knowing of the forest as both balm and treasure. While Clare goes to wild places to learn and discover, she also goes there to rest and breathe, consciously replacing her experience of despair with peace and beauty and vastness. It is in this place that she can steady herself with thoughts of recovery, replenishment, activism and return. It requires steady effort.

The varied artworks in the exhibition work to convey Clare’s relationship with the forest as a sanctuary, a place that holds her, us, and all of the wild things within its complex and miraculous ecology. Hideaway is made up of watercolour paintings, of imagined and true landscapes, all with shelters nestled within, a video installation documenting beauty and it’s unravelling, installations of ceramic and mixed media sculptures and a Clare-sized, cocoon/cubby made from her home garden pruning’s.

As a collection, Clare has combined her feelings of despair and grief alongside her great hope to convey the strength of nature’s intelligence and the fragility of its balance. Hideaway is an expression of love for the forest and a communication of Clare’s state as she grapples with the reality of our climate emergency and the relentlessness of daily life.

By Sarah Stewart