Clare Woods
Victim of Geography
24 June - 10 September 2017
Clare Woods’ exhibition Victim of Geography was a solo show of raw and powerful new paintings. These vast oil-painted aluminum sheets, the largest measuring 3 x 2 metres, punctuated DCA’s light and spacious galleries.
Woods paints from found images, her selection of photographs featuring people at their most vulnerable, bodies that are exposed or in a remote landscape.
Through long, curved brushstrokes, faces, limbs and outlines come to the fore and are distorted into apparitions that are just out of reach. Yellows, browns, blues, reds, greens and pinks – each work features a single colour which is then pulled apart across the painting, with the daintiest of light hues worked through to the darkest shades.
A new book was published to document this exhibition in our galleries. The publication was inspired by Clare Woods’ research into The South Polar Times - a series of publications produced by Captain Scott and his team during their expedition to the Antarctic on Dundee’s RSS Discovery. The dimensions and aesthetic were drawn from this collection of one-off, hand-typed and illustrated publications that helped to give Scott and his team a focus and coping mechanism during the hardships and isolation of their long journey.
The publication includes an introduction by Beth Bate, alongside two newly commissioned pieces of writing by Anouchka Grose and R.W. Paterson in response to the work of Clare Woods. It includes full colour images of the twelve new paintings that formed her solo exhibition, as well as images of source material from the artist’s studio. It is available to buy from DCA Shop.
About the artist
Clare Woods is a renowned painter who lives and works in the Welsh borders. Her work is held in many major international collections including the Arts Council England Collection, the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, USA. Recent exhibitions include Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, Oriel Davies Gallery in Wales, National Museum of Wales, Buchmann Gallerie in Berlin, and a permanent public commission for the London 2012 Olympic Park.
Clare Woods: Exhibition Notes
Exhibition images
