Lot 375 - Claire Kerr - Lake

ARTIST INFO

About 

Claire Kerr is a painter based in Dublin; she also uses drawing, print, objects and text. Modest in scale, her work invites intimacy with a viewer but leaves open the question of meaning and interpretation. Often concerned with the fundamental properties of an image – surface, depth, context – her work seeks out the idiosyncratic or peculiar, trains of thought at a tangent, an unobtrusive weirdness. 

Education 

Wimbledon School of art and IADT, Dun Laoghaire 

Select Exhibitions/Awards 

Selected one-person exhibitions 
One Thing Turns into Another: New Work, BravinLee Programs, New York, opening 24 October, 2019 
What else do I believe in?, Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, 5 May – 5 June, 2017 
Madrid Paintings, New Work, espacio artkunstarte, Madrid, 26 February – 31 July, 2016 
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne (Düsseldorf-Cologne Open Galleries), 05 September – 11 October, 2014  

Selected group exhibitions 
Summer Show 2022, Graphic Studio Dublin, 30 July – 3 September, 2022 
The Golden Fleece Award: 21 Years, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co. Meath, 23 April – 4 June, 2022 
Eye on Nature, Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, 27 January – 28 February, 2022 
Paint on a Photo of a Painting Based on a Photograph, espacio artkunstarte, Madrid, 10 September – 23 December, 2020  

Selected Awards 
2021 Print Residency, Graphic Studio Dublin (DLR) 
2021 Arts Council of Ireland, Visual Arts Bursary (an Chomhairle Ealaíon) 
2016 Residency, r/e projects, Madrid 
2013 Culture Ireland/Cultúr Éireann 
2012 Golden Fleece Award 
2009 Thomas Dammann Jr Memorial Trust Award 
2002 Fergus O’Ryan Memorial Award 

Gallery Representation  

Purdy Hicks Gallery, London 

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork  

The lake in this drawing is the mysterious Loe Pool in Cornwall, one of the locations associated with Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake. I visited the lake last spring and with no-one else around, it seemed timeless in the sunny afternoon. The ripples on the surface of the water and the rushes by the water's edge were exactly as I had imagined from reading about Sir Bedevere in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, when, instead of throwing the sword into the depths of the lake as he had promised, he at first hides it at the water's edge, replying to Arthur's question as to what had happened, ''I heard the water lapping on the crag/ 
And the long ripple washing in the reeds'', giving himself away by his answer. I drew the lake as if through a monocular or lens, or perhaps as if at the end of an old film, wanting to give a sense of both nearness and distance in time and space.