The Siren – Clare Logan

Like a cascading river or a cloud crawling atop a ridge, in The Siren Clare Logan captures natural movement through pours of paint which flow across her works. She pursues the tension of opposites within the untameable natural world, particularly experienced in a solitary tramp through the New Zealand back country. Through instinctive, responsive, layering of paint she creates contrasts in texture, tone and form to find a resonance with the experiential feelings of being within these mountainous landscapes.

There was a nor’west weather system sitting on the divide and I was just east of the divide. Often in New Zealand when the weather is like that you’re in a rain shadow, which is when you can see big weather on the divide – dramatic raining and storming – but it was dry where I was. To me, the feeling of being able to see that happening, and yet be dry, separate and a bit detached, but feeling occasionally little spatters of rain, brushing at the very edge of the weather system, felt profound. The tension of it.
—Clare Logan

The paintings in The Siren embody the murky abstract worlds of feeling and bodily experience. How our bodies relate to the world around us in their materiality and movement is condensed into these works. Walking a path between opposing forces of chance and control, vigour and stillness, sense and myth, Logan finds balance and beauty. Crashing cascades and sinewy pools of paint hold the energy of the artist’s movements through the work. Draping clouds speckled in a haze of paint drops. Ridges and gills intersected by serpentine streaks. Overflows blending in serendipitous confluence. Oil paint is the language Logan uses to explore these indescribable, profound, feelings that we all know but don’t have the words for.

Click here to read more about this body of work in our City Art Reader interview with Clare Logan.