Claire Paterson graduated from the Glasgow School of Art Painting and Printmaking department in June '08, winning the inaugural Steven Campbell Hunt Medal for Creativity, the School of Fine Art Dissertation Prize, and the British Airways Travel Bursary. Her first solo show, entitled Unsign, was held at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 1st November – 22nd December 2008.
During the period of February–May 2009, Claire used the British Airways Travel Bursary to embark on a trip around California, New Mexico, Mexico, Arizona and Texas, doing research into the symbolism and iconography of various religious groups in these states. Since then, she has participated in group shows, and has been developing a new body of work for a potential solo show in the near future.
Her work questions received notions involving the central role of figurative representation in contemporary art practice.
Artist’s Statement
My work is concerned with investigating aspects of the ongoing debate surrounding representation. My current practice involves appropriating and enlarging diagrams and schemas central to current art debate; incorporating them into figurative paintings, wherein they take on a variety of compositional and symbolic purposes.
I am concerned with the ‘mythologizing’ nature of representational practice as a whole — in particular figurative painting, with its historical associations and implications within the dichotomous framework of Western hegemony. My work explores the parallels between metaphysical and ontological notions concerning spirituality and ‘being’; and the poststructuralist modalities that attempt to escape, or chart ‘lines of flight’, from these notions. I am interested in the related use of paint as a distorting, mythologizing representational mode; but also as a medium through which the figure is able to extricate itself from its own re-presentation.
Figurative representation plays a dual role, as a mode both implicated in, and offering an escape from, Western hierarchy. My work aims to explore the intricacies of this relationship, while actively questioning my own implication within the representational tableau I am both investigating and generating.