Clare Connolly
Visual Artist
ARTIST STATEMENT: Art is survival. It grants me the ability to implement an aspect of control back into my life by providing me with a creative outlet. Throughout that outlet I’m able to process painful emotions and childhood traumas where I experienced a lack of control. It is this idea of control that drives my work intellectually and physically as I seek to find balance between control over the paint and materials I use, while being responsive to the raw emotions that guide my practice.
READ MORE
Working with thread allows me to gain a sense of agency, rebuilding and seaming together things that have been broken, and navigating the narrative of how they may manifest in my future. This further connects to the wider never-ending struggle that consumes the human condition as it tries to control that which it has no control over.
Trauma alters and distorts memory, preventing us from accurate recollection. I manipulate material aspects of my past in order to physically replicate the traumatic process. In the way that memory is altered as it is replayed, I white out the aspects of physical documentation that I do not remember, and distort what remains as none of it is fully accurate and never will be. Without art making I have nowhere to channel my emotional experience. Art is a necessity for me. Without it, I self-destruct.
Rebuilt
MULTIMEDIA SERIES
Altered Memories
MULTIMEDIA SERIES
DRAWING