Claire Jarvis

About

Often highlighting an almost perverse obsession with surface and proximity, Claire Jarvis’ practice explores themes of hygiene, waste, sustenance and consumerism, bending the relationship between fact and fiction.

For Claire, our surroundings are just a particular arrangement of ‘stuff’– hundreds and millions of Things – some static, some in motion. Becoming overwhelmed by the quantities of even the most unremarkable ‘stuff’ and their day-to-day significance within routine and structure, Claire documents and transcribes the sea of everyday objects through her hyperrealist paintings to describe a personal psychological journey experienced in digesting the gaze of the everyday mundane. These building blocks are obsessively documented, studied and transcribed through oil on canvas, to the point where they grow to take on a hallucinatory and surreal journey of her imagination. These incorporate phobias and fantasies brought on by the boredom of the paintings’ lengthy process and rigid constraints of everyday living.

This new body of work is being presented for the first time at NN. Many of the objects depicted in her paintings have undergone an uncanny treatment inspired by Claire’s role as a parent, such as monumental, towering stacks of Dairylea triangles or a lonely, abandoned crisp packet. Structure, repetition, the unknown, penetration, sinking, towering, consuming, exhaustion, proximity and fragility are all key elements within this work.

About the artist:

Claire Jarvis works and lives in Northampton. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2009 she has since gone on to become an associate Lecturer at The University of Northampton. Claire has exhibited nationally and internationally and has won various awards including The Stanley Smith Scholarship (2007), runner up for the Gordon Loot Award for Fine Art (2009) and first prize in painting from NDFAS (2005).