Claire Cartwright, Float

About

Claire Cartwright is a Bristol-based artist and designer who enjoys exploring the boundaries between art, design and the creation of functional pieces using cyanotype and screen-printing. She graduated in 2012 with a degree in Printed Textile Design from the University of Brighton and has been working with screen-printing and design for the last 9 years. She set up her studio in Bristol 3 years ago with a desire to make things with her hands and, simply, the urge to play and have fun with patterns.

A common theme in her work is the positive and negative elements and the interplay and development of these are they are explored using her two different studio processes, cyanotype and screen-printing. Claire has a cyclical approach to designing, whereby ‘design waste from one process informs the creation of the next, and so on. She encourages commissions and collaborations within her work to introduce freshness with new perspectives and practices

Similar motifs travel through the collection and are echoed and informed by the process. The interplay between the controlled nature of screen-printing and the variability of cyanotype is explored with curiosity and playfulness. Observing how motifs and designs lend themselves to each technique and evolve along the way directs the design of the next piece. Cyanotype allows me to use precision whilst inviting the inherent variability of the process to resonate. Using our natural ultraviolet light source, the sun, with the endlessly- changing sky means I’ll never produce identical prints, whilst screen printing and the limiting nature of hand-cut stencils offers a more confined style and designing within tighter boundaries.

I thoroughly enjoy applying print to functional objects such as lighting. Not only the concept of creating light with light through the cyanotype process but also adding a dynamic continuation of the design, allowing it a transient spirit - a reminder that nothing is fixed.