I am a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist living and working in Southern California. My lived experience and my interest in activism are the driving forces in my creative process. I use my artwork as a tool for activism, drawing on social issues that have affected me on a personal level, such as my experience of motherhood, the politics of childbirth or sexual violence. My artwork explores universal issues of gender and collective identity, culture, memory and loss, while it is imbued with the feeling of saudade, a typically Portuguese trait roughly translated as a nostalgic longing or yearning of someone or something of the past.
I have used a wide range of media - including painting, installation, social practice, video and sound - but drawing and photography remain at the core of my practice. Influenced by Vija Celmins's drawings, Andrea Bowers use of text and activism and Suzanne Lacy’s commitment to social justice, my work examines inequality and is borne out of a desire to call attention to the often invisible and overlooked issues that affect primarily women.
@celiarochastudio
Working from a feminist perspective and employing images and materials from daily life, Claire Greenshaw engages with the tensions that arise from the ambiguity of representation. She channels this into humorous and idiosyncratic poetic gestures that provoke questions around perception, the complexities of history and systems that create and enforce the values we live by.
The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom, Contemporary Art Gallery, 2020.
https://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/exhibitions/the-artists-studio-is-her-bedroom/
My current work views the world through the lens of a parent, simultaneously embracing joy, frustration, hope and fear. My work has always engaged in the liminal states of consciousness, through examinations of precipices, seams, folds, and crevices. In this new work, figurative elements of hands: my own and my children’s, become further lenses for exhuberence or despair. In some cases the hands obscure, and in others highlight. Both experiences are true, useful, and not mutually exclusive. I often feel that my arms are my most precious resource. They allow me to hold hands across parking lots, to carry bags, to prepare meals, to wash dishes, to gesture when I am intensely speaking, to draw, to write, and they are often full.
Precarious balance has always been at the crux of my work, and never has it seemed more true to my lived experience than as an artist and mother. The imagery included with the arms and hands continues to reflect the landscape, as I am habitually drawn to rock formations and fields of flowers. I connect this imagery to the world we inhabit, are desperate to protect, and which holds the history of generations. Through this work, I hope to examine and share the experience of motherhood, in all that is devastating, and all that is jubilant.
My ongoing practise researches and investigates parenthood, including; pregnancy, child birth, the relationships we have with our children, and considers that parenthood may not always be that of gaining a child but may be about losing them too.
I create installations as a visual interpretation of sensitive and personal experiences. I work across a variety mediums and disciplines using photography and film, painting, drawing and sculpture and the components can also be viewed as individual pieces.
My practice based research uses autoethnographic and feminist methodologies to examine maternal subjectivities with a particular focus on the mother as a classed and gendered subject.
I am also interested in the performativity of motherhood and in examining narratives of the good and bad mother and how these narratives are perpetuated in everyday encounters and experiences.
Domestic Landscapes are oneiric installations made with light, kitchen utensils and shadows.
The complexities of how we inhabit and engage with our surroundings and the entities we share them with are at the core of my work. Informed by the photographic process, larger works and installations tend to incorporate light and projection as well as sound or video while smaller scale works often consist of everyday objects and multiples. Simulating nature with man-made items and transforming life’s daily chaos into delicacy, my work edges between childlike playfulness and a longing for the seemingly out of reach. Grounded in the home and activated by life with young children, necessary and repetitive daily tasks are absorbed into my work and reappear to expose beauty through reflections on domestic life.
Homage to Heqet
2012
Mott Community College Art Gallery, Flint, MI
The complexities of how we inhabit and engage with the earth and the entities we share it with are at the core of my work – systems within systems.
Over the past two years, frogs and toads have been a vessel for my perpetual interest in the simulation of nature. This exploration has manifested through drawing, installation, video and sound. My materials and habits tend toward everyday objects, multiples, and layers. Homage to Heqet is an extension of this work; An offering to frog-headed Heqet: Goddess of fertility, midwives, and newborns.
In the spring, amidst frog calls and blooming earth and henna on my belly.13 days later, a daughter was born into water, a force of nature.
Ritual is intention & process. I’m focused on honoring repetitive, menial daily tasks in mothering an infant, while embedding and reflecting on elements of our wetland counterparts.
In 2012 I founded An Artist Residency in Motherhood — a structured, fully-funded artist residency that takes place inside my own home and life as a mother of two young children.
Artist residencies are usually designed as a way to allow artists to escape from the routines and responsibilities of their everyday lives. An Artist Residency in Motherhood is different. Set firmly inside the traditionally “inhospitable” environment of a family home, it subverts the art-world’s romanticization of the unattached artist, and frames motherhood as a valuable site, rather than an invisible labour for exploration and artistic production.
As the first artist-in-resident-in-motherhood I aim to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as my working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome.
The following works are amongst those made during my tenure as Artist-in-Residence-in-Motherhood;
The Distance I Can Be From My Son
All Scissors in the House Made Safer
63 Objects from My Son's Mouth
The project is archived in full at www.residencyinmotherhood.com. On conclusion of my tenure in May, 2014 the project will be passed along to two new residents.
An Artist Residency in Motherhood was funded by the Robert C. Smith Fund and the Betsy R. Clark Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation and a Sustainable Art Foundation Award, and supported in kind by Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse.An Artist Residency in Motherhood was exhibited at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2012, and documents and works from the project are currently being exhibited in Complicated Labors at University of California Santa Cruz, curated by Irene Lusztig & Natalie Loveless until March 15th 2014.