In panels of instinctually poured oil paint and flowing ink and other media on paper, Ōtautahi artist Clare Logan captures the embodied, emotive and dreamt experiences of nature. Through her process, the artist gives form to impressions of flux and fluctuation of the world. Ahead of her exhibition ‘Leaving the lighted shore’ she spoke with City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston in her studio. Leaving the lighted shore opens 5.30pm Tuesday 8 October and runs through to the 29th of October.
Clare Logan’s artist studio
Cameron Ralston: It’s interesting to see your studio full of works on paper, is it quite a fresh approach for you?
Clare Logan: For at least a couple of years I’ve been trying to see what I can do with works on paper and water-based media. I really like the immediacy of it. As a way of testing things, it’s quite experimental.
What do you use? Ink? Watercolour?
Mostly ink, some of them have watercolour, some have liquid acrylic I’ve heavily watered down. In the past, I’ve played around with acrylic mediums too, pouring them on, seeing what happens. But lately I’ve been finding that I’ve been enjoying seeing what water on its own does when used in different ways. I’ve been really going for it seeing what the paper can take. So, some can be quite laboured. From an initial drawing, I’ve washed it, made it really wet and scrubbed it back and then worked on it again. I like the unexpected things that the process brings up. Finding different ways of mark making. Like rubbing really deeply with a cloth and my knuckle and then pouring a wash that holds the imprint.
That really translates what you’ve been doing with the oil paintings where we’ve talked about the way you pour paint.
Yeah, it feels like a similar approach. I like to see what happens. I’m always into finding ways to be surprised by the materials. I get the paper really wet and then pour and keep pouring and use water to make the light and dark areas. It’s unpredictable and it can be quite frustrating. But it’s a thrill when it works.
You can be quite iterative and loose with works on paper. You don’t have to be quite so worried about wasting material.
I like that about it. It expands things. If I’m feeling worried about being super economical with the way I use paint, it can make the works feel like they lose something. They start to feel constrained or tense. Having this strand to my practice means I can test and work things out. Then bring that to making the oil paintings.
Arch (day/night), Clare Logan, mixed media on paper (framed), 435x535mm, 2024
Are you still approaching the works with a mind to your experiences in the back country?
More and more this year it’s been swimming into my awareness that making these works in the way that I do and going out into the mountains – having embodied physical experiences of engaging with the land – it’s like a way of trying to understand the nature of things. Going out into the hills I engage with this wider body of ecological systems and geological processes as a body, and it brings me into an observant, experiential stance. I think I’m realising that’s kind of the nature of the work. It’s an attempt to understand and reflect my experiences of what I see and observe.
I’ve been reading a few things which have been quite influential. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and another book by the eco feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, who was nearly killed by a crocodile, and wrote this great text called The Eye of the Crocodile afterwards. I was reading both these books at the same time and they led me on a bit of track. In Annie Dillard’s epigraph she used one of Heraclitus’s fragments. He was a pre-Socratic philosopher whose work has survived in a collection of fragments. They’re all kind of about the unity of opposites, which I was thinking about last year as the tension of opposites, but here it’s the unity of opposites. The idea of flux. Things flowing into each other. Ever changing in a process of constant transformation.
In what way? Biological? Elemental?
I don’t know if he talks about a specific realm in which this happens. It’s more saying this is the nature of the universe, that things are constantly changing. Nothing is fixed. Everything is transforming, changing, circling around and becoming each other. Dying and rebirth, all that sort of thing. In the Val Plumwood text I was reading, she writes about the impact of her experience of having nearly being eaten by the crocodile as travelling through the eye of the crocodile and being plunged into a Heraclitean universe, that upended her assumptions and understanding, in the sense that she was part of the food chain, not special as a human. A structure of sensations and meat and food which I think is easy to lose sight of in the very anthropocentric world we live in. It felt revealing to encounter Heraclitus through these two works. His fragments resonated with me.
Could you read out the fragment?
This is the epigraph of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: ‘It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.’ He was quite obsessed with fire, Heraclitus. So, I suppose it’s a metaphysical and spiritual orientation towards the world.
Lure (twinned), Clare Logan, oil on board, 1000x800mm, 2024
There is something in clearing your mind of the excesses of modern living and returning to the base human of yourself that you get from going out and existing in nature. Your paintings are often a sort of record of those moments or emotive states. It’s a difficult translation to make into a painting, but somehow, they capture that.
It’s good to hear it has that effect. Maybe that’s the aim: to try and translate this metaphysical, complicated and subjective world of feeling and experience.
Do these things sit in your mind when you’re painting, or is it just instinctual?
It’s pretty instinctual. I think my mind does get quite quiet and I’m just like, ‘Oh yeah, dark area here’ or whatever. It’s like my body disappears and I never remember to drink water. I just get in the zone. When I’m making and it’s going well and I’m not self-doubting or uncertain, it’s an experience of being quite present. I’m watching really intently and making interventions as the paint spreads and moves. It has that quality of intense, watchful concentration.
Do you have to be quite patient with the way you paint?
Yes and this year in particular, I have slowed down the process. But also, over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to push towards resolutions to the paintings that feel less laboured to me and a little more natural, less heavily layered. I’ve made these works slowly. There’s been usually a month or more between working on each layer. It’s been a shift and I’m still seeing how that feels and what it means for the work. Also, what it means for me. Maybe I’ve channelled the swifter energy into the drawings. When you’re consistently over time working on something, you feel quite connected to it.
You get a lot of feedback from it that way?
Yes, I think so. The paintings have emerged and resolved slowly. They make sense to me now, but it’s a different experience to making work more quickly. I’ve enjoyed the slower emergence and getting to spend a lot of time around the works as they’re drying and being still. To me these works feel less laboured than older works, do they to you?
Waiting for the ferry, Clare Logan, mixed media on paper (framed), 415x535mm, 2024
Yes, there’s a distance between the first works you were showing at City Art Depot and where you are now. You can see the progression in your practice. I’m curious to know about how your writing plays into your art making. Last year you mentioned a dream journal.
Yeah, I keep a dream journal. I also collect little bits and pieces – descriptions of places or encounters. Something that’s happened. Sense of place, in my dreams especially, is always quite vivid and strong. So, I draw from that and try to bring that into the artworks.
Though the paintings are not of specific places, do they recall experiences or locations to you?
All those experiences live in me. They’re in my memory. They show up in my dreams. So, I think they emerge naturally through the works. Lately I have been starting to think more specifically about place. For example, I like to go over to Diamond Harbour and when I’m waiting for the ferry I sit on the jetty looking at the water. To me, when I made Waiting for the ferry I could see that in it, after the fact. I’d already finished the work, but then, a few nights before I took it to you for framing, I was down at the jetty at night and I was looking at the water and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what that work is.’ So, it’s a felt and intuitive sense of where things come from. This year I’ve been getting more interested in Jungian ideas. That’s partly what the dream journal is about, seeing what might come up serendipitously or from my unconscious. Thinking about the way things can live in us and find form.
The seer, Clare Logan, oil on board, 600x500mm, 2024
Tell me about this work hanging above the others, The seer.
That work emerged quite unexpectedly, it surprised me. I’d arrived at a point in the process where I thought it wasn’t working so was going to scrape it off, but I thought I’ll go for it with one last big experimental pour and see what happens. That form came out of it, and it felt like a tether for the rest of the body of work. To me it feels a little bit like a figure, a watcher maybe, that is moving through these other places. There must have been a figure in me that wanted to come out. I’ve been on a track towards mysteries. We live in a time that tends to disregard intuition and feeling, that is so rational, that it can feel hard to talk about things like visions and dreams.
To a degree you can always rationalise things, but sometimes it’s not worth doing. I think with abstract art there’s a necessary mental leap. To consider your senses and yourself. You place yourself within the work in quite a different way to what you do with even your older paintings, which are more descriptive of landscapes. You have to let yourself…
Surrender…
Yeah, let yourself be with the works. Which I think suits the ideas that you’re exploring. It can be hard to do, but very rewarding.
For sure. You have to be brave and not inhibit yourself. It’s a different quality of attention.
When you’re deep in the wilderness or away from modern connectivity, you can only be with what is there. Is it similar to that concentration you talked about when you’re painting?
Definitely. I think it brings you into your body, your humanity.
