Katie St. Clair: ERRATICS at Burren College of Art
Katie St. Clair‘s (MFA 2014) interpretations of the Irish landscape are featured in ERRATICS, a solo exhibition on display through June 25 at the Burren College of Art.
St. Clair spent 2015 as a visiting artist at Ireland’s Burren College of Art. Her painting practice is built off what she sees, experiences, and how she interprets the landscape, and she spent much of her time exploring the limestone pavements of the Burren.
Large surface rocks, called ‘Glacial Erratics’, catch my eye. Following them, like an array of markers, I take a course over the limestone pavements; pausing to feel their newfound lichen skins. I stop to consider their presence; and see them as a momentary assortment, lingering here temporarily, after being carried by the fluxes of past glaciers. Their current inertia and grey self-containment belying the motion that once brought them to here. They seem to sit lightly now, as if propped on their own self-made pedestals, while the soft day-to-day mineral erosions of wind, and interspersing rain, play out in the fresh happenings around them. This phenomenological research would change her paintings: I started painting by questioning what I knew of rocks as being heavy, inert, ancient and life less; forgoing their likeness to capture their essence and potential. I began to capture the Erratics’ glacial displacement through the ephemeral motion within my paintings. I mimicked how I instinctively followed the Erratics and how elastic time felt in the Burren landscape. The paintings hold the same malleable sense of time, as I worked on canvases simultaneously and purposely left them in a non-controlled state. A state left open to possibility.
ERRATICS: Paintings by Katie St. Clair
May 27 – June 25th
Opening Reception: May 27th
Burren College of Art, Newtown Castle, Ballyvaughan, Co. Clare, Ireland