Clare Mitten

Excerpt from Exhibition Catalogue

Written by Skye Sherwin

For the three artists awarded the first Jerwood Painting Fellowships, painting is clearly not a matter of a self-contained world held in check by the barriers of a canvas. One presents photographs, another objects and collage in addition to gouache and even the oil paintings that seem most traditional are hardwired into other kinds of images: video stills, snapshots or news clippings. Instead, they give us painterly representation as a promiscuous, changeable, untrustworthy thing, connecting with life in unexpected ways.
Clare Mitten’s hybrid, multi-part work sends technological gizmos through a series of transformations, grounded in the business of painting. Here clocks, cameras and slide carousels are among the gadgets inspiring hand-rendered models, subject to all the chance, imperfection and individuality a human touch entails, which in turn prompt gouaches and then collage, made from coloured card. Indoor Static, for instance, begins with a camera on a tripod, realised Blue Peter-style from card, paper, glue and paint. It may not be much of a copy – the disc of honey-hued paper strips standing in for the flash flops comically – but these ‘failures’ bear fruit.
Homing in on certain details, Mitten’s flattened the model’s form in a gouache composed of circles, stripes and rectangles. By the time this has fed into the geometric abstractions of a large-scale collage, the cardboard camera has become a muted, formal echo. Turn back to the model though for a peek into its central chamber and you’ll find little coloured orbs dangling on thread, like planets in the cosmos. This notion of a cosmos in a camera, of a universe of creative options and possibilities embedded in a single object, seems key to Mitten’s work.
Numerous associations spin outwards from Yellow Mantel. Viewed from the front, it flips between two and three dimensions as the eye moves through planes of painted cut-out card as if they were the plates of a clock, with interconnected spools and wheels suggesting everything from a mutant film projector to Moorish architecture, planets again, or a painting by Mondrian. Take a step to the side, however, with the cruddy edge of card on view and each plane propped up like a set in a Western, and the illusion falls apart.
It seems no accident that the centre of Mitten’s new works is a cartoonish model of a man’s wristwatch. Like the tick, tick, tick of a clock’s hands, motifs are repeated and translated throughout her work. One set of evolving choices become the frozen moment of an image, suggest something else and move on to something new.