Clare Wardman

I take an auto-ethnographic approach to Contemporary Art Practice at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall where I am based. As a phenomenological site of specific interest to my reflexive studio practice is the patina of paint found on the floors, walls and doors formed by weathering, light and occupancy - the fishermen and the artists. I use the studio as both an instrument and a conceptual framework to develop my inquiry into the notion of fragment as generative phenomena.

What makes the loci of place? Art making perhaps, or physical histories and cultural products whose temporal presence is often cyclical, mirrored in the drawings on paper, their material agency embedded in the building itself - unfinished and infolding.

The painted image evokes the notion of fragment and is the fragment at the same moment. In this place the painting operates as both a singular process and from the patina a source of many authors, a hinge, from artist to artist. "It is the fragment and fragmentary state that are the enduring and normative; conversely, it is the whole that's ephemeral, and the state of wholeness that is transitory." (Tronzo, William. 2009)

Clare Wardman