Claire Ward

(The Abyss)

I am right here with you I cannot be analyzed, I will never be owned I am viscerally weird strange, disruptive non-specific, you feel me all the time, I am everywhere, I am uncanny, I will give you goosebumps, but you are out of sync so I am out of sync. I am not connected but hang on I am all the connections you will always know and more, I am vivid, I can leap out at you and surprise you, yet you aren’t surprised as you always feel me. I wane like the moon, shine like the sun, I am an orchestra playing your tune but that’s impossible as I am the tune, I am the abyss you think is strange, but it’s this abyss where I touch you most, grab you, plead with you, I can see it all, I feel it all, you think you see it all, but you never will. I will lick the gaps, no one can point a finger at me, I will be that constant irritating distraction that logic will never understand. I will always be here with you. I am you.

I am a transdisciplinary artist who has always been concerned with the greyey bits of humans, those parts that aren’t clear and the decisions made within them.

There is an unaccountable amount of visceral, hubristic data, information, knowledge dumped at our feet, much of which we are not aware of that influences our choices. This is why I have my own methodology of ‘Heapology’ in order to navigate, nurture & ‘lick the gaps’.

‘Heapology’ is the strange sticky idea of heaps, dumps, stacks or piles. 

The formal concern is the process of truthy dimensions ‘so massive in relation to our human and non-human biosphere’. It’s this strange, weird abyss where I am ‘licking the gaps’ drawing attention to ‘blurry’ tactics of communication that are central to the simplifying or not of a complex problem. 

There is a politics in choice which is central to the materiality of the work. The sculptural response is triggered by trusting the hunch & maybe blurry thought, searching everyday ‘things’ - piles - heaps - text - energizing a remix - a withyness, a more than human connection, a new thought, new hierarchies, a possible whole.