Claire Primrose: Artist Statement & Bio

When we think of a place, we imagine it not in its entirety, but rather as integral parts; feelings and images pieced together to create the impression of a whole.

In Primrose’s practice, she mirrors this concept, the serendipitous recreation and abstraction of these views encourage our eye to piece together the changing actions of material, much like Primrose herself does so in her studio - so that we too, may feel a sense of place. She pieces together the remnants of these places; a collection of memories, samples and studies which are then reworked into the applique of paint. Through a process of layering; she scratches, sprays and applies a mixture of mediums in a way that not only conjures up feelings of awe and wonder felt only by arriving at a greatly-anticipated scenic view, but does so in a way that allows the colours, layers and gestural mark-making to actively illustrate the scene before you.

Claire Primrose is a painter who works primarily with mixed media. Primrose graduated with a BA in Visual Arts (majoring in printmaking) at ANU, Canberra, in 1997. Based in Queanbeyan, she has also completed a Graduate Diploma in Secondary Art Education and has taught both Visual Art and Dance at various high schools in Canberra for ten years. She has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2015.

Primrose has participated in various group and solo exhibitions both locally and nationally; including being selected for DIRECTION NOW> national touring exhibition with 10 other artists who also focus on abstraction. She was the winner of the 2017 Waverley Art Prize – Drawing. Most recently she has been selected as a finalist in the 2019 Wyndham Art Prize, SA; the 2019 Hunters Hill Art exhibition and the 2019 Highly Commended and People’s Choice Winner in the Wingecarribee Landscape Prize, Bowral.  She has also been selected as a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize, The Fleurieu Biennale, The Kedumba Drawing Award, The Tattersall’s Club Landscape Prize, The Hawkesbury Art Prize, Morton Bay Art Prize, the Norville Art Prize, the Whyalla Art prize and most recently, the Paul Guest Drawing Award.

Claire was awarded winner of the Queanbeyan City Council Regional Art Prize in both 2009 and 2015, the Goulburn Regional Art Award in 2016 as well as the Capital Chemist Art Award Tuggeranong in 2015. She has also been awarded a Highly Commended in the Queanbeyan City Council Art Award in 2010 and the Hawkesbury Art Prize in 2012.

Claire Primrose: CV January, 2020 Download

Brendon Stewart: Artist Statement & Bio

'Bridges and Returning Clouds' Exhibition Statment

On a recent visit to Japan I had time to visit Sendai, a provincial city to the north of Tokyo. Sendai came to the world’s attention when a tsunami swept in from the deep Pacific and took all before it. Never before had I seen street signs that warned of tsumanis. Nearby is the fishing village of Matsushima where elegant, red lacquered wooden bridges link a necklace of small islands.

On Zen master Ungo’s
Narrow, Venerable Verandah
Today
Matsushima’s waters
Stay still.

In Buddhism crossing from the shore of illusion to the shore of enlightenment over the raging river of samsara is a common enough metaphor. A simple plank bridge, that reappears in many Japanese prints is all that is necessary to carry profound meaning.

Bridges link communities and at the same time gather together the landscape. Martin Heidegger says of bridges that they swing over space with ease and power. The bridge brings to the water the expanse of the landscape beyond. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape.

Here at the other end of the great Asia Pacific on the island of Tasmania we find a simple and elegant bridge built by the hands of convicts and conscripted soldiers spaning the river Ross.

The world comes to us with shapes, colours, atmospheres and textures, these are the circumstances of all things. It is not necessary that things be possessed by spirits, although for many that may be the truth, but I prefer to engage imaginatively with an alive world. This is not simply by way of personalizing something, my car or the photocopier or a bridge, a painting or a Jacaranda tree, rather it’s imaginatively allowing the alive nature of things to own their own presence.

During the brief few weeks of early spring each year I try to hold onto the colour of Jacaranda. This vibrantly coloured botanical immigrant has come to mark something quite particular about my city, about my Sydney; Jacarandas are so delightfully suburban yet their colour can never be caught, there is a certain delinquincy in the way they show off. Sometimes they seem to be lit from within, dare I say purple/blue/mauve/lilac/cream, who knows but their show thumps against my eyes causing me to wince sometimes.

The great built world needs to be perceived in terms of its imaginative presence. The space of a bridge, its entrance and the way you leave it, its middle and the highest point of the arch steady the way it suspends space. And then there is the underside of the bridge where trolls, tramps and wanderers linger and the where the smell of urine and wild water mingle. The bridge has both an elevated spirit and a deep dark underworld, it is integral and intimate with both.

I shy away from calling myself a Buddhist even though I have been stumbling along with my Zen practice for nearly forty years. I don’t think of my art work as reflective of Zen except to draw on some simple and consistent metaphors that recur over the years especially in poetry and brush work. The bridge, flowers and the return of the clouds are simple and profound companions of the Way.

Dr. Brendon Stewart, Senior Lecturer (retired) School of Psychology, University of Western Sydney.