Interiorities : Custom House Studios
8th December 2025
‘We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. “Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there’s that broken spur again, that fall…and so on indefinitely” ‘
Breton (1928)
Calle lives in the shadow, existing in the trace of another, yet she exposes her interior musings and weaknesses more so than any of the subjects she aims to possess. Breton’s Nadja becomes a mirror that frees him to truly question and understand himself. Woolf’s lamentations reveal the turbulence just below the surface, yet always capture the most beautiful, tender, intimate observations. In Woodman’s enigmatic, symbolic and orchestrated self-portraits, while seemingly a reflection of some kind of inner turmoil, reveal the questioning, curiosity, and intention of an overflowing creative mind.
Maybe impressionable, but definitely leaving an impression, I not only feel an affinity with these artists and others whose influences are present in this exhibition, but closer than that, it’s as if written or visualised through my thoughts, my ponderings, my obsessions.
Images intersect, memories layer and bleed. Things that belong to another are now in my possession.
Echoes, traces, mirrors, reflections….. shared interiorities.
In this exhibition and through my embodied drawing practice I aim to interrogate authorship and autobiographical links and the blurring of edges between the two. The images and references in this exhibition while disparate in their nature, are like thought streams, from one story or creative mind to another; tied together by little synchronicities, personal experience and the human condition.
The Living House : Household Belfast
8th December 2025
Through photographic, moving-image, drawing, sculptural, and text-based artworks, In Living Memory explores the elusive nature of memory and where it resides.
Works by Niamh Clarke, Kanich Khajohnsri, Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl, John Rainey, Amanda Rice,and Lyónn Wolf in this site-specific exhibition attempt to evoke the spaces and places where activities have occurred; consider how embodied, transient, and resistant acts can be captured and represented; and how objects and materials store and transmit memories and stories across time.
In Living Memory is installed on the exterior of a North-Belfast Victorian end-of-terrace house on the Antrim Road. It marks the start of ‘The Living House’, a new collaboration between Household and MMAS architects to inhabit and re-animate the building. Within this new neighbourhood setting and context, alongside MMAS’s socially engaged and community focused architectural practice, Household will create an artist residency space and programme and ‘living archive’ that connects with the creative potential of the domestic and the city’s past, present and future.
Uphold, a sister organisation to Household, a non-profit online platform promoting and selling work by contemporary artists in the North of Ireland, commissioned me to create an edition for this exhibition.
Head, Heart, Hand (Black Mountain College Series), is an edition of 5 giclee prints of a drawing of a photograph from Black Mountain College. Black Mountain College was a liberal art college based in Carolina, USA, active during the 1930’s to mid-1950’s. It’s radical teaching attracted some of America’s most influential artists and thinkers and became an incubation space for experimental production.
The image explores how collective artistic activity can bring forth new forms of creative and social practice.
Head, Heart and Hand was the holistic ethos of the college, embracing an instinctive, embodied and emotional practice and learning and its interdisciplinary approach meant dancers, poets, painters’, architects and crafts were taught together. I took influence from the drawings and poetry from the teachers and alumni of the college for this edition.
The typewritten text is hand transferred to the print using carbon transfer paper alongside a stitched thread drawing.
These prints are for sale at Uphold.com
lucent
25th April 2025
lucent, a touring group exhibition of small works curated by artist David Quinn, involving twelve international artists – Charles Brady (Ire), Niamh Clarke (NI), Vincent Hawkins (UK), Hiroyuki Hamada (JN), Tjibbe Hooghiemstra (NL), Jamie Mills (UK), Janet Mullarney (Ire), Helen O’Leary (Ire), David Quinn (Ire), Seamus Quinn (Ire), Sean Sullivan (US) and John Van Oers (BE).
“Although I have curated quite a few exhibitions, I am first and foremost an artist and not a curator. This exhibition is a very personal project. The work I have included is by artists whose work and progress I am always keen to see. I think there is a lot of truth in Robert Motherwell’s quote ‘every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints is both a homage and critique.’ To a greater or lesser extent, the artists in this exhibition have been inspirational to me or sometimes it is just as Emerson said ‘in every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts‘.
One of the common threads through the work of these artists for me is a sensitivity for materials and for the quality of line. Most of the artists here also blur the distinction between painting and sculpture. Their sculptures can be quite painterly and there is a subtle tactile element even to the works on paper. The other thing that interests me is that it is often hard to pin down exactly what the works are about (if that is what one is inclined to do). There is an inherent ambiguity in lots of the work, a vague open-endedness. Also, the scale that these artists often work on is intimate and personal. The works are memorable rather than monumental, suggestive rather than didactic, playful rather than strict. Where there is order it is often subverted and generally an air of gentle irreverence. Ultimately though the thing that draws these works together for me is that they are made with the attentiveness and care that comes from a labour of love.’
David Quinn, 2023
lucent is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon as part of the 2023 – Strategic Funding – Touring – Arts Centres Grant, and initiated and developed by Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre. The tour of lucent began in Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre and ran from 9 July to 9 September 2023. It then travelled to Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda from February to April of this year and ran in Wexford Arts Centre from Saturday 15 June to Wednesday 31 July, 2024. Its final destination was The Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth and rand from 17th January to 15th March 2025.
niamhclarke.info 