Clare Logan is a Christchurch based painter whose abstract works explore personal modes of relating to the natural world and the landscape, traversing and investigating what lies between psychological and physical experience. Ahead of her exhibition ‘The Bend’, City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston visited her studio space set on the outskirts of the city in an old flower packing shed with corrugated skylights and large open doors which let in both the cool weather and bellbird song. ‘The Bend’ opens at City Art Depot at 5.30pm on 19 July, 2022 and runs through to 8 August.
Cameron Ralston: Tell me about the trek you took in January – where did that occur in the cycle of making these works?
Clare Logan: I started making the paintings in mid-January when I got back. A friend and I went from the Dart River, at the head of Lake Wakatipu, up to the Olivine Ice Plateau, which falls within the Olivine Wilderness Area, a designation intended to preserve the intrinsic values of a wild, special natural landscape. There are no huts or tracks, aircraft can’t land there, and it’s very remote. From the ice plateau we travelled via various ridges and valleys to Big Bay on the West Coast, then up the coast to Jackson’s Bay.
Did that journey have an impact on the work you made for this show?
Going on these excursions into the mountains, alongside the pleasures of exploration and physical challenge, is a mode of thinking about, in quite an embodied way, the stuff that obsesses me – such as the nature of perception and what it is to be a physical being in relation to other physical things. On that trip in particular I was observing certain things and processes in the places I went to, which informed my background thinking as I made these works. There was a particular high cirque we got to where on the map it showed a glacier, but when we got there the glacier wasn’t there any more. It felt quite remarkable that since the map was made in 2018 there had been such a rapidity of transformation in that physical space. I was very struck by that. The word ‘transformation’ has been rattling around my brain through making these works.
Clare Logan, Vaulting overhead, oil on board, 12000x900mm, 2022
Does ‘The Bend’ fit into that idea of transformation? That point where things start to change? Maybe the bend is like that point in time on the map?
I think so. ‘The Bend’ struck me as a title for the show because it has a litany of associations which feel very applicable to what I’m trying to do as an artist and what I’m interested in. Just as you were talking I was thinking of a line curving in a graph which shows the moment things change and transformation happens – an inflection point. Something that can conceal, like not being able to see around a bend. It also brings up a spatial association which I like.
Do you mean quite a literal spatial association? As you’re hiking you must experience lots of bends in the landscape as it reveals itself to you.
It’s always quite a thrilling moment when you’re coming up to something – over a pass, onto a ridge, where the line of sight opens up. I’m thinking of when we were climbing up to the col we entered the Olivines by – it was a place I had been obsessed by, I had been looking it up on maps for ages. It’s a really wild place that not many people go to at all. Walking up to it, that anticipation was very exciting; it was kind of revealing itself.
I think the paintings have that quality to them too. It’s not something that you can take in all at once – there is a process of viewing, unfolding and revealing. Especially in the way you use different layers and textures throughout. There is a lot of detail in the works such as liquid cloud-like forms and rougher fragmented paint. When you’re out in the wilderness, are you noting things that you want to directly bring back into the works? Or is it more that now you’ve spent so much time out there, you have a feel for these things?
I think it’s both. There’s the intuitive side of it but then I also take a lot of photographs and if I’m struck by a particular quality of light or something interesting texturally or some material that I see, I’ll record that and think about it when I’m making the works.
Are you cataloguing with writing as well? Do you keep diaries?
I do keep diaries on trips and while it’s partially a record of where I went and what I did, there’s the feeling side of it where I’ll write fragmentary impressions or things I noticed, imagined or felt. It’s that other side of the experience that’s not purely physical. I think in my writing I’m trying to bring a quality of my perception, drawing upon senses beyond the physical observable stuff.
Clare Logan’s artist studio
Do you think working in this studio space with its natural view and light has changed the way you make the works compared to being in the central city and bringing those thoughts back from the mountains?
The natural light is really nice to work with. But I’d say not really. I feel like I can work anywhere. The biggest thing is that studio size impacts the scale of the work I can make. Last year I was working in the NG Building in a smallish space, so I made smaller works. I really like this space, love the bellbirds, I feel really happy here. There aren’t many practical difficulties to the space that I have to contend with, it’s a pleasure coming here.
Outside of the mountains, are there any new influences that have been interesting you around the time of making the work? We’ve talked a bit in the past about horror and the body – is that still a focus for you?
I think the horror and body stuff is all tied up with a fascination and anxiety with being corporeal and the implications of that. Which is maybe why I was quite obsessed with body horror because it felt like it was revealing something about that to me. I haven’t been watching very many movies at all lately. I don’t feel like I’ve been drawing upon other works as an influence to my work in an explicit way, but I’m always influenced by what I’m encountering, paying attention to, on some level. I suppose it’s been a work of a particular emotional quality that I’ve been drawn to this year. I find music very affecting so I have to be careful what I listen to. I’ve been listening to a lot of David Berman’s songs which are really poetic. I encountered Annie Dillard’s writing this year, which I loved. I always read fiction, I’ve been reading Jim Harrison’s novellas this year, and horror stories by Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez. I watched Terrance Malick’s Days of Heaven while I had Covid. These are works that have a melancholia of place, very atmospheric and lots of feeling.
Clare Logan, Incoherent, oil on board, 800x700mm, 2022
When you first showed me these works, you mentioned that you were trying to focus more on the initial pours. There’s certainly a strong movement in them – does that come from those?
I really wanted to retain the movement of the initial pours in these works. It’s something that I’ve found exciting in the past but would then move beyond as layers built up. But I wanted, in these works especially, to preserve the movement and rhythm that happens early. I like the immediacy and challenge of finding a way to make that work. So though a couple of these are slightly more laboured, most resolved quite quickly.
Now I know your process, it’s quite interesting to view the works because I can almost envisage you pouring and painting, similar to way that people must have looked at a lot of abstract expressionist painters.
Imagining the physicality of it.
Yeah, but then there’s still mystery in that which is where some of the joy of viewing them comes from. It can be quite intriguing when you see some texture or detail and wonder how on earth did that occur.
That excites me too. It’s surprising to me. Early on, I’ll do a big pour – it’s great having this big door here because it doesn’t get so fumey – and just observe as the paint moves across the board. I can be watching and think, ‘Wow, I love that.’ If I could freeze it right there, that would be great. But then coming back in a few days once it’s started to dry, things have changed again. That quality of serendipity and surprise is really important to me. It delights me when making these works.
Clare Logan, Seen swaying, oil on board, 1200x900mm, 2022
