Welcome

Claire Rollinson is my mother. I am very proud to introduce her work to you. The following text is a loose analysis of her work, as I have seen it develop, throughout my life. I have ordered the essay thematically, under the headings “Meditation”, “Animism” and “Soteriology”. I hope that by the time you have read this text, and immersed yourself in the artwork on display, you will have an understanding of what these words mean, in the context of my mother’s art.

Thank you, Mum.

Meditation

Claire Rollinson’s art is meditative in two interconnected ways. First, it is the process and product of a reflective practice, concerned with the practical particulars – the glimpses, the gestures, the moments of transmission – of a highly personal phenomenology. Phenomenology is a long word for the study of things and our relationships with them. We all have particular ways of perceiving, conceiving and describing the phenomena that surround us. A person who trains their eyes, hands and mind in any representative art, and who takes seriously the problems of perception, conception and description, is engaged in practical phenomenology. Claire is such a person. Her phenomenology is reflective: it takes into account the slippery nature of subjectivity, blending still-life observation with memory and fantasy, realism with caricature, linear perspective with planes of flattened colour, and deliberate lines with the arbitrary textures enforced by the medium.

Another aspect of Claire’s art that demonstrates its meditative nature is that, with every new work, she essentially restarts from the very beginning. The variety of the work she has produced over her career, and her refusal (or constitutional inability) to settle onto a single style, medium, or subject matter with any sense of finality, is testament to this fact. With every work, the particularity of the subject demands a fresh new foundation, a fresh new schema and plan of attack; and every plan, once created, is likely to be modified or dropped very quickly, since it must necessarily yield to the demands of the medium, the form, the vicissitudes of execution, the changes or perceived changes of the subject. She relies on no set formula or strategy. She does not plot first. Every new piece of work can be viewed as the latest – and by no means final – instantiation of a continuing practice.

Animism

I stated that no single subject matter has manifested in Claire’s art for a sustained period, but it is true that certain tropes have been identifiable over the years, appearing in phases, proliferating and then dispersing again into scarcity. Teapots. Tables. Certain domestic items of decorative or ritual value. Animals. Crosses. Dots. Claire’s aptitude for the illustration of children’s books demonstrates the animistic quality of her practice: children inhabit a world in which objects and animals are infused with vitality.

Play, for a child, often takes the form of an animistic shamanism, a reordering of relationships between non-human entities invested with consciousness. Claire’s art, too, is animistic and shamanistic, to the extent that it is playful, delights in drawing forth new forms of life out of the primordium and providing them with the conditions in which they might themselves play, including new toys and playmates, and pleasant or magical spaces in which to reside. In this sense, a composition might be regarded as an ecosystem or community, full of interdependent and intercommunicating forms. There is no set hierarchy between representations, abstract shapes, planes or even text; each instantiation determines its own compositional rules, which will be abandoned or restated in the next work. To a certain extent, this must be true for the practice of all representational art; Claire’s willingness to accommodate the requirements of individual elements, no matter how apparently inconsequential, marks out her work as unique.

Soteriology

Soteriology is the field of thought, usually theological, that concerns itself with salvation. Claire’s art practice deals with salvation as a logical development of its animistic tendencies. As a responsible creator, she is sensitive to the needs of the totems she has imbued with life. The interdependence or intercommunication of each ecosystem depends upon a sense – more gestural than communicable, residing in that reflective practice described above – of benevolent balance. That is to say, these pictures are not necessarily bound by compositional strictures; the immanence or irruption of the new and strange (and often accidental) is integrated through the introduction of countervailing playmates or taken as a signal that the work is complete.

Claire, like many artists, often focuses on the vexed question of when to declare something finished; she tends to decide that works are finished early, when another artist might still regard the work as incomplete. This too is rooted in soteriology. While the work is still happening – often, while the brush strokes are still visible – it is still vibrant. It is better to start a new piece, than to apply the kind of conclusive strokes that will either tidy things up or pin things down.

Which points back, of course, to the meditative nature of her practice, which resists conclusions, promising instead continuance and change, restarting afresh with every iteration. Since Claire’s artistic practice is a lifelong calling, she has carried it out – and will continue to carry it out – regardless of the interest or negligence of potential buyers or patrons. It would be a lot better all round, though, if people were to reward her properly for the focused application of talent to which she has dedicated her life. You should buy her work.

Jacob Rollinson
01/09/2020