Claire Davies
“In recording the works I like to create spaces, so you can hear me thinking, as I work through these ideas. I also often return to the notion of internal imagery, such as trying to recreate an object through my memory of it.“
Interview by Brooke Hailey Hoffert
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I graduated from Intermedia Art at Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. Upon graduating me and some friends set up Rhubaba Gallery and Studios in Edinburgh, which really helped me to stick around in Edinburgh with a purpose, and a cheap studio! After several years I moved back to my hometown, Nottingham and started working in the Fine Art department at Nottingham Trent University as a Moving Image Technician, which I absolutely love, as it’s the perfect balance of technical and one-to-one teaching. Last September I finally took the plunge (after years of scrolling the online prospectus) and started a part-time MA at Goldsmiths in Artists’ Film and Moving Image. I still live in the Midlands (because I wanted to study in London, but I didn’t particularly want/could afford to live there) so I get trains up and down fairly often. But for once, Covid-19 has worked in my favour, with a small portion of things like large lectures being online, which really works for me right now.
What inspired you to explore narrative structures such as fictionalisation and humour in your practice?
It came about after I moved back to Nottingham, and I initially had my studio in my house. I had a spare room in the attic, so it really felt like a little hideaway. I was filming some greenscreen, using green card on the table as a backdrop and my cat Audrey kept wanting to play, jumping up on the table thinking it was all about her. At first it was quite frustrating, adapting to this new way of working, constantly having interruptions. But then I realised she caused me to see and process things differently, often in a humorous, completely unknowing way. I started to piece together these different snippets of things that had happened. The aspects of fictionalisation and humour initially came about as by-products of this process. Fictionalisation is something I’m actually scared of, and I often resist, but I’m slowly prodding and pushing at it to find out more. With humour, I’m interested in how it disarms the viewer, creating an open dialogue and can indirectly carry several messages at one time. There should definitely be more humour in art.
The Valley of Lost Things (Excerpt)
The Valley of Lost Things, Two Queens, Leicester, 2018
The Valley of Lost Things, Two Queens, Leicester, 2018 (Detail)
Can you elaborate on your interest in the distortion of observation and understanding by technology?
It’s something I’m still working through to understand myself, to be honest, it takes me ages to process things. I sometimes start making a work or ruminating on an idea and several days later it dawns on me that it relates back to this recurring interest in technology and how its integration in our lives is slowly altering our perception of daily things. More and more we’re becoming conditioned to seeing the world in a certain way, through the lens of these various software and hardware technologies. When I moved house the listing for my house had a sky that had been masked out and replaced for a different one. It was a really bad photoshop-job and the new sky just didn’t fit with the lighting of that day, so it made the image look quite odd. I’ve since found out that Photoshop has a specific ‘Sky Replacement’ tool, so you can quickly eradicate all the bad skies of your life, replacing them with beautiful blue skies and sunsets. With our vast consumption of images, I’m intrigued with how the use of these tools might cause us to process everyday things differently, will we start to become enamoured with grey skies?
How does “continual re-processing in the mind's eye” display itself in your work?
As my art practice developed through my use of the home studio, I started to record these evolving thoughts which were influenced by interactions with friends, family members, and my cat. I’m really interested in not just the conclusions that I come to, but also my process of getting there, how it can flit from logical thought to something seemingly random. In recording the works I like to create spaces, so you can hear me thinking, as I work through these ideas. I also often return to the notion of internal imagery, such as trying to recreate an object through my memory of it. I’m interested in the translation something goes through as it passes from being an object, through my thoughts and back to an object again. Currently, I’m looking at how this works when I’m out on a run, not as an endpoint, but as an energy and structure to hold these random thoughts. I don’t particularly love running, but I do it as a sport of convenience, to keep things ticking over. Through running I’ve noticed all sorts of stuff flies around in my head, from my environment, to my body, daily tasks, and stresses, its this randomness of the mind that is interesting me at the moment.
Gif Cat Gif (Two Minute Excerpt)
Gif Cat Gif (Still) 2016
Gif Cat Gif (Still) 2016
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
After periods of having a studio and working from home, I’ve now settled to find that working from home generally works best for me. I definitely miss the social and commuting aspect of having a communal studio space, but I found having a studio would cause me to make work in a different way. I would make more physical work as a way of justifying the expense and really neglect the reading and writing aspects which are so important to my practice. My studio/MA days are Monday-Wednesday and Saturday. I’m very much an out of sight out of mind kind of person, and with video editing so much of what you do is buried away on the computer, not seen until you’ve gotten over the hurdle of actually sitting down and turning it on, so I’ve started printing out stills and annotating on footage I’m working on or interested in. I always try and have Sunday off, go out for a walk, or just spend time in our new allotment space in the garden. I think it’s really important to have regular periods where you can see a long way away, a couple of miles across towns, fields, buildings and to the horizon.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
During the last two years I’ve attended several film festivals online and one that I particularly enjoyed was the San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival. During these online screenings I caught “People on Sunday” by Tulapop Saenjaroen, I enjoyed it so much that the format allowed me to watch it three times across a few days (once at home, once on the train and a third time at work), which felt like a bit of a treat. The piece followed a group of actors, on their day off, acting out free time, as not-working. Navigating formats of documentary and film, actor and subject, fiction and non-fiction, it moved between different spaces of leisure, blurring the lines between labour and relaxation. I really enjoyed its moments of awkwardness, as you piece together who or what to believe and the paradoxes inherent in the characters themselves, as gig-workers working and not-working in our contemporary work/life economy.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I am working on two pieces at the moment. I often work on two or three things at a time, I find it helps with giving the workspace to breathe and develop in its own time. The first one is about a sky I saw that looked fake, like it had been made in Photoshop with the paint tool. I’m really interested in how the real thing looked like a badly made fake thing. I don’t have documentation of this sky, so I’m currently chasing my internal vision of it and considering how to work through this concept in the work. The other piece is about my unknowing relationship to NFTs. I feel like I’ve opened a can of worms with this one, as there are a million different routes of research I keep getting slightly distracted with, so I’m currently working through the root of my interest in this topic and finding structures to hold on to throughout the work.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 18/02/22
