exhibition

Finding Solitude – an exhibition of drawings

| Claire

Venue:
The Coffee Stop Café, St Mary’s Market, St Helens, WA10 1AR
1st February – 30th March 2024
9am-5pm Monday – Saturday

You can also view the works in an online space if you are unable to make an in person visit to St Helens.
View the exhibition in an online space here

Claire Weetman presents a collection of drawings of chairs that invite you to sit down, but that time to rest alone is just out of reach.

This collection of pencil drawings, created by Claire in 2023 and 2024, began by thinking about how time alone either physically or mentally is difficult to achieve as a parent. Chairs are perched precariously on branches or balanced on top of a tottering tower of bins that need emptying. The chairs are inviting, you’d quite enjoy that seat for yourself, but ultimately, all of these chairs and their offer of rest are unusable. 

Each chair is based on a real chair. Three of them were seen abandoned outside while walking to school with her children. Other drawings feature real chairs that have been moved to a more surreal setting to elaborate on the feeling of never being able to find time alone. 

Claire started making this series of drawings during an artist residency in 2023 with Wild Rumpus and (M)other Collective, where she and a group of artist-mothers stayed in the woods for 4 days. While sitting on an old wooden dining chair in the middle of a field she read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. In that book he compares familiar landscapes with the maternal body. “There is no other place of which one can say with such certainty that one has already been there.” Within these drawings, Claire has aimed to capture the familiarity of a chair and to set it in a location that we feel we might have visited. But within each drawing there is some barrier, either physical or emotional, that prevents us from sitting down in peace. 

Finding Solitude - never disconnected. A pencil drawing of a wooden chair in a field of long grass. A telegraph pole is visible in the distance.
Finding Solitude - precarious balance. A wooden chair with an arched back support is balanced high up in the branches of a tree.
Finding solitude - pilgrimage to the bins. A wooden chair sits on top a tower of three metal rubbish bins.

The original drawings are available to purchase at a cost of £150 each, and prints will be available at a cost of £15 each. Please use the contact form on Claire’s website if you wish to make a purchase.

We Reside* Here

| Claire

As the lead artist for Artists Together – the artist development strand of work for St Helens Libraries and Arts NPO – I’ve been working on a programme of work during 2023 called Reside*

During 2023 St Helens has been the Liverpool City Region Borough of Culture, so for this creative year the programme was built around this thought:

“What if every artist who is RESIDEnt in St Helens was recognised as an artist-in-RESIDEnce for the year?”

We started the year with a pop up exhibition at The World of Glass that mapped the locations of artists around the borough and shared what they were planning on working on during the year. Following opportunities for artists to get help with funding, planning and commissions, opportunities to make work together, 1-2-1 feedback from curators and producers and chances to share ideas with each other, we have arrived at the end of the year and the production of We Reside* Here.

We Reside* Here is both a publication and exhibition that maps and showcases the work of over 60 artists in St Helens. The document features a map, illustrated by Cady Davies and with graphic design by Karen Hitchcock, that places each artist in the area of St Helens that they are based, showing our audience that artists aren’t rare beings, only to be found in the big cities of Liverpool and Manchester. These artists are our neighbours, the people you meet on the school run, the folks standing at the bus stop, and they are only a small proportion of the people who bring light, colour, stories and the joy of creativity into St Helens.

As well as mapping some of the artistic population, the We Reside* Here document provides guidance to artists. There are examples of how a number of artists are making their work, designed to provide inspiration and support to other artists seeking to develop. A list of organisations who support people’s creativity features, along with a breakdown of what the process of Reside* was during 2023, so that other artists can pick this up and make new work in the future.

The exhibition that accompanies We Reside* Here is installed at St Mary’s Market in the large event space from 25th November – 20th December. This features an installation of the map, with its cardboard-cut-out style illustrations and showcases the work of many of the 60+ artists, whilst signposting audiences to other works that exist in locations around the town.

Reside_onscreeninfopackDownload
ResideMap-onlyDownload

Artists Together and We Reside* Here is supported by