Watermark was a 90 minute intervention on Barbosa Park, Istanbul on 29 March 2012.  Claire painted water onto a course of adjacent paving stones, drawing a line that follows a prominent route taken across that space by pedestrians. The water dries and the line documenting the movement of the people fades and disappears, echoing the temporal nature of people’s presence in that place.

Spread is the third in a series of animated drawings onto mountcard.  They take inspiration from Richard Serra’s verb works, where he created sculptures in response to words such as ‘to roll’, ‘to crumple’ or ‘to cut’. 

I’m going to take some of the words from his list, but also include words that have an inherent feeling of movement in them too, then create a series of drawings using cut away mountcard.  So far I’ve made ‘descend’, ‘curve’ and ‘spread’.  More to follow over the process of time.  Longlist of future words includes:

scatter, pair, surround, lift, follow, fall, shuffle, jump, loop, grow, criss-cross, ramble,

****These artworks have now been taken to a good home by their new owner****

Claire Weetman is moving studios during April and has two large artworks that she can no longer store. These are available for free, collected from St Helens. If you are interested in owning either of the works below, please email claire@claireweetman.co.uk before the end of April to save them from the skip. These are also listed on Ebay where 50% of any selling price will be donated to Charity.

Untitled: Four Panels. 2008
Paint marker on perspex.
Four sheets of 12mm Perspex, H2.44m x W1.22m

Untitled, Four Panels was created in 2008 during the Liverpool International Artists exhibition at Novas CUC. It comprises four perspex panels, with drawings on one surface of each. The drawings, in black or white, mapped and followed the movement and silhouettes of visitors to this exhibition.

The original installation was four panels displayed in the centre of a room in parallel, however, for preservation of the drawings, they would be best displayed fixed to a wall, with the drawn surface behind the perspex.

These would be ideal for a public space, or as a feature wall in a large home. You can take all four panels or fewer if appropriate.

Stepped 2008
Two rows of perspex panels, standing vertical from a white formica-clad base box.
Base is 2.4m long, 0.75m deep, 0.20m high. Panels stand perpendicular to the base to a height of approx 0.75m
Stepped features drawings of legs and feet, captured from a street in Stuttgart in 2008. They are line drawings onto 14 pieces of perspex, which overlap each other in two rows, creating a 3-dimensional representation of the people passing along the street.

The drawn surface is protected in a sandwich of two pieces of perspex, which then slot into the base box and are bolted together using discreet chrome fixings at the top. The base box has a slight chip to it’s formica cladding where a cleaning machine damaged it on first installation. The perspex panels do not have rounded corners, so may prove a risk if displayed in an accessible public space. Stepped was created as a commission, but was unable to be installed following risk assessment that the corners of the perspex were an injury hazard for display in a public space.

:Chapel Gallery, Ormskirk
www.chapelgallery.org.uk
24 March – 5 May 2012
Tuesday – Saturday
10.00 am – 16.30 pm

From the epic to the intimate, fifteen contemporary artists exhibit work that relates to journeys, whether the discoveries of global travellers or the imaginative voyages of the mind. Through media such as print, painting, installation and film, these artists critique the ways in which humankind is perpetually on the move.
Claire is exhibiting a collection of five drawings from her ‘One Minute’ series of work, including three new works made especially for this exhibition. Pencil and graphite drawings trace the movement of people through the architectural spaces of the Van Gogh Museum-Amsterdam, Earlsfort Terrace-Dublin and Lello Bookshop-Porto plus two works created in 2008 featuring Kyoto Station and Liverpool ONE. (http://www.claireweetman.co.uk/oneminute.html)

Journeys includes work by artists: Stephen Clarke, Jean Davey Winter, Gerry Halpin, Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor, Carole King, Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Rachel Marsh, Jenny Pope, Amy Russell, Catriona Stamp, Rebekah Tatlow, Andrew & Caitlin Webb-Ellis, Claire Weetman and Wendy Williams.

www.platformartsthelens.co.uk
25 February – 15 April 2012
Tuesday – Sunday 10.00am-5.00pm
The Godfrey Pilkington Art Gallery,
Mezzanine Floor, The World of Glass
Chalon Way East, St Helens, WA10 1BX
Free admission to the gallery

This is part two of a two-part exhibition that began at the Godfrey Pilkington Art Gallery in its historical home of the Gamble Building and concludes in it’s new location of the World of Glass. ‘Presentation’ is an exhibition that showcases the artwork that was produced during a fortnight period at the Godfrey Pilkington Gallery in the Gamble Building, where studio spaces were created in the gallery. Artists worked in the gallery showing visitors the processes behind creating their art works and allowing artists to share their practice with each other. In this intensive period 12 artists have produced new artworks in the gallery studios; a selection of the artworks are shown here at the new Godfrey Pilkington Gallery, covering a diverse range of disciplines including painting, drawing, photography and sculpture.

Claire is exhibiting the work ‘Four Minutes -Victoria Square, a four-part, ink on rice paper work which charts the passage of pedestrians and vehicles across the square below the Godfrey Pilkington Gallery’s home of the Gamble Building. ‘Production’ and ‘Presentation’ exhibitions were curated by Claire for Platform.

Exhibiting Artists:Paul and Gillian Adams, Stephen Ball, Hannah Bold, Mary Christie, Tony Glover, Handle with Cake, Sharon Leahy Clark, Isabel O’Rourke, Jacqui Priestley, Claire Weetman, Angela Wilkinson, Philip Wilkinson.

The past 2 fridays I’ve been attending a workshop at Salfor Uni on Stop Frame media. Led by the most helpful technicians Craig and Steve, I’ve been picking up tips on setting up, lighting, image sizes and this week have had my first foray into editing with Final Cut Pro and DVD studio pro.

I spent a couple of hours last week with limited materials and equipment producing and photographing the work, and here’s a rough edit of what I’ve produced

At the end of November I led a workshop for adults at the Brindley exploring graphite powder and animation. It was a successful day, with lots of interesting drawings produced which were made into animations on the day:

Participants experimented with hand cut stencils, graphite powder, mark making and using masking tape to create these drawings.

During November 2011 I’ve been working with 10 men and their tutors in the art class at HMP Wymott for the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. The starting point for our work has been a painting of ‘Puck’ by the artist Richard Dadd.

“Puck”, a central character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sits on a toadstool while smaller fairy figures dance around him in moonlight. Dadd’s painting evokes the play in an abstract way featuring superb draughtsmanship, a powerful poetic imagination, an intense love of nature, and a mastery of dramatic lighting. For approximately 100 years the painting was in Preston, having been purchased during the early 1850s by Thomas Birchall of Ribbleton Hall, Preston and held by his descendents until the 1960s. In 2011 the painting was purchased for the Harris Museum & Art Gallery with the support of The Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Friends of the Harris Museum & Art Gallery and a bequest from Mrs Dorothy Wade, administered by Arts Council England.”

Like the men who took part in this project, Dadd was an incarcerated man, and it is this situation that has inspired the Portal. The men produced collages which were compiled into a book seen here. Inspired by Puck’s ability to change situations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the collages consider what their creators would change in their own lives if they had the magical juice of the love-in-idleness flower that causes such confusion in Shakespeare’s play.

Themes of time passing and a desire for luxuries are to be expected from those who have too much of the former and not enough of the latter, but from those basic responses flourish fundamental desires for love, health, family, nature and change, resulting in this appealing collection of collages.

The collages were an important step along the way to completing drawings, which we animated using series of still photographs. The book and animation, plus a drawing on perspex were exhibited as part of the 2011 Harris Open. Together they form a narrative about time passing and transformation providing a window to the lives of the men who created the works.

I’ve been working at Salford University as part of AA2A for the past 4 weeks, going in on regular Tuesdays to realise a piece of work that I’ve wanted to make on a larger scale. And it’s been useful. I’m not sure its entirely successful, but it has brought me to a new idea about how to use the process and a link to some of my more theoretical research. I’ve taken a break this week to reflect on the work done so far and to plan more work to come.

So here is the process I followed to create ‘Tearing Space Apart (Salford I)’

• A wall is covered in newspaper
• The newspaper is torn off the wall and methodically numbered
• The wall has co-ordinates marked along its edges
• Fragments of newspaper are placed on the wall at randomly allocated co-ordinates
• Each piece of paper is drawn around a number of times with pencil according to its catalogue number
• Lines do not cross
• The fragments of paper are used again, this time they are outlined using powdered graphite according to randomly allocated co-ordinates
• Ends

And some images.

And some video documentation:

The St Helens Open exhibition has come around again. I’ve submitted two works – one has been selected to be shown at the Godfrey Pilkington Gallery and the other is off to (what I term) the Salon des Refuses at MASH art cafe.

Private view takes place Tuesday 15th November 6-8pm and the exhibition continues until 17 December 2011.

St Helens Open
Godfrey Pilkington Gallery, 1st floor, Central Library, Victoria Square, St Helens
and
MASH art cafe, Haydock Street, St Helens.

Wednesday 16 November – Saturday 17 December 2011