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Claudia Carr's Unstill Life Exhibition

Claudia Carr's upcoming exhibition at Jessica Carlisle's pop-up gallery in London will showcase a series of paintings depicting a fennel bulb at various stages of its life cycle. While still-life paintings traditionally depict motionless objects, Carr challenges this notion by capturing the flux and impermanence within stillness. She reflects on how appearances shift over time, as well as her own changing perceptions. The paintings embody these ideas, showing how the fennel appears to evaporate and the paint dissolves into the canvas fibers. For Carr, still-life provides a way to visualize intangible concepts like ideas, thoughts, and observations through material objects.

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10 views1 page

Claudia Carr's Unstill Life Exhibition

Claudia Carr's upcoming exhibition at Jessica Carlisle's pop-up gallery in London will showcase a series of paintings depicting a fennel bulb at various stages of its life cycle. While still-life paintings traditionally depict motionless objects, Carr challenges this notion by capturing the flux and impermanence within stillness. She reflects on how appearances shift over time, as well as her own changing perceptions. The paintings embody these ideas, showing how the fennel appears to evaporate and the paint dissolves into the canvas fibers. For Carr, still-life provides a way to visualize intangible concepts like ideas, thoughts, and observations through material objects.

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BE L GRAVI A RE S I DE NT S J OURNA L 017

AT A STANDSTILL
The owner of one of Belgravias best pop-up galleries,
Jessica Carlisle talks about an upcoming exhibition on
one of still-lifes greatest executors, Claudia Carr
S
till-life is one of the oldest and most enduring forms
of painting. Although ranked lowest in the traditional
hierarchy of the genres (considered less difcult, and
thus less prestigious, than history painting, portraiture or
landscape) it is nevertheless a genre of perennial popularity
and perhaps the most appealing to buyers of art.
Radicalised in the 19th and 20th centuries by
Impressionism and Cubism, Modernism freed it from the
need for strict representation and it continues to be a rich
vein for contemporary artists. Yet it is also a genre that
tends towards, or lends itself to, the decorative, with many
artists historically and to this day using it as a way to assert
painterly prowess or simply to create a pretty picture.
While Claudia Carrs still-lifes clearly demonstrate
a high level of skill (she is a tutor at the Royal College
of Art, as well as The Princes Drawing and Heatherley
Art Schools) and are undoubtedly works of exquisite
beauty, these quiet yet powerful compositions are much
more than acutely observed and dutifully represented
objects. They are works of contemplation, perhaps even
transcendence. For Carr, still-life is not only a means
of exploring painterly concerns such as colour and
composition, but a way to pin down to visualise and
materialise ideas, thoughts and observations. It is the
tangible gateway to the intangible realms of the mind and
the spirit; the visual hook.
Indeed, one could question whether Carrs still-lifes are
really still-lifes at all. In other works the artist has depicted
table-tops strewn with hunks of bread and crumpled
tissues as wild and desolate places haunted by giant toy
animals, creating works that are simultaneously still-life and
landscape. In an exhibition opening at my pop-up gallery
in Kinnerton Street this month, the artist again plays with
the denition of the genre by showing a series of works that
challenges the notion of stillness within still-life.
The paintings depict a living object a fennel bulb
at various stages in its life. Some are bright, white
and rm; some shrivelled, desiccated and browned.
On viewing the group collectively one could be forgiven
for passing these off as traditional nature morte.
Artists have often in the past depicted organic matter on
the cusp of decay as a reminder of the transient nature
of earthly existence. But these paintings are not more
than memonto mori; less a reminder of death than an
afrmation of life and its perpetual ux.
Grappling with the changes in the fennels
appearance over time, as well as the shifting light, and
indeed her own altering perceptions, the artist reects on
the idea of impermanence; that everything is subject to
change, or as the Ancient Greeks put it, how everything
ows. As Carr explains, The idea of stillness is like the
idea of silence; the quiver within stillness and the loud
hum within silence. I wanted to explore that lovely quiver.
I gave myself lots of constants, which gave me the stability
to explore the ux.
And thus these ideas become embodied in the
paintings themselves, in how the fennel appears to
evaporate into the air around it, how the paint dissolves
into the grains of the canvas. These still-lifes are not about
stillness, but the movement within stillness. They are,
perhaps, unstill lifes.
The Buttery Counts not Months but Moments runs from
16 to 21 September at Jessica Carlisle, 83 Kinnerton Street,
SW1X 8ED ([Link])
From left: FE36; FE33; FE28, all by Claudia Carr
For Carr, still-life is the tangible
gateway to the intangible realms of
the mind and the spirit

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