Claire Cowie | In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere | Viewing Room
Meditation (series), 2018-2020, collage, watercolor and acrylic on paper, each 12.5 x 9.5”
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Special audio presentation, click to listen:
In this audio file Mita Mahato reads her text titled Navigate: A Conversation with Claire Cowie’s Exhibition In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere. A text version is available for download here.
Claire Cowie
Artist Statement
In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere refers to the space unknown to most of us, the place just outside our understanding. It is an “almost-void”, since there is no such thing as a truly empty space.
This work is about finding peace within discomfort, loss, and death - making work at a time of great anxiety. I’ve taken the image of a mariner’s compass, and used it as a focus for inner contemplation. Often fragmented in this work, it is used as a representation of my attempts to navigate a meaningful life (and the crashes, bumps, and accidental discoveries along the way).
Meditation No. 8, 2018-2020
collage, watercolor and acrylic on paper
12.5 x 9.5"
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Imperfect Vessel No. 3, 2020
papier-mache, acrylic, fabric and concrete
19 x 14 x 12”
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“I’ve never had a personal hierarchy, and I prefer to mix up the processes (painting on sculptures, cutting apart prints, using sculptural forms as references for drawings or photographs). The contrasts and relationships between materials have always been more interesting to me than any one material on its own. So, collage suits me best in that it’s a form that can be a mixture of forms. It is the most like thinking - taking many bits and pieces and trying to make meaning out of it all.”
Contrasting the natural magnetism of the earth and the pull of the cosmos, this work explores the tension between groundedness and soul-searching.
I’ve been working on the series of small collages titled Meditations over the course of two years.
I began them at the beginning of a dear friend’s illness, they progressed through her death, and they were finished in the midst of a global pandemic and a cultural reckoning with our society’s severe racial and economic injustices. My concerns around care-taking, grief, and embracing the unknown moved from the personal to the universal.
A collection of awards titled Memento Mori are reminders of our mortality as a practice of appreciation. Made up of fragments from text messages, they bear the burdens of the everyday as well as the magic of opportunity.
The Imperfect Vessels are named such as they are leaky, tilted, more moon rock than vase. Their function is as yet unknown, though I imagine them holding socks or plants or loose change. They come with Comfort Blankets, made of repurposed clothing and hand-printed fabrics.
Two larger works on paper, Elegies, are poems of grief and happiness, strength and vulnerability.
This exhibition investigates the ways in which we make meaning and impose order in a chaotic world, and it celebrates finding beauty in unanticipated places.
– Claire Cowie, 2020
Claire Cowie, In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere, on view through September 26, 2020.
Memento Mori (Series), 2020, paper, fabric, acrylic and watercolor, dimensions vary
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Claire Cowie, In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere, Installation Detail
What We Can See, 2020
murrine glass and steel
9 x 7.5 x 3"
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Enormous Things
A reflection on Claire Cowie’s Exhibition In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere
by David Strand
Open google drive, right arrow to scan images quickly. Pause on what stands out. Do it again. Then more slowly. Resist the urge to open a new tab. Fail. Forgive yourself. Give what rare bouts of undivided attention you can.
What if text messages accumulated like award ribbons?
Pinned up proudly or tucked beneath the bed in a shoebox for safekeeping
Rather than archived in an endless scroll
How many would you keep? For how long?
These small reminders
Ordinary, now exalted
Words worth repeated viewings
We’re missing something (always)
The body is a leaky vessel
Too unwieldy to offer any neat explanations for its failures
Don’t deny it the negative space it deserves
Better to offer a blanket and let the rest float away
In the space of the unknown
you feel things you can’t see
and see things you can’t feel
Remember to breathe when it’s painful
You’re clenching again, holding on too tight
Relax your jaw, soften your shoulders, open your chest
An emotional rootwad, hard knots coaxed loose
Bundled and melted into glass, cut cleanly in half.
A vast expanse stretches overhead.
Can understanding be found in presence rather than clarity?
Rubbed and pressed on paper
Sliced and rearranged
Two things that come together to make a third, a fourth, a fifth, you get the idea
Sidestep dogma, the resurrection was always just a coping mechanism after all
Dip into feeling, leave the door unlocked
You already have everything you need
It’s just a snake shedding its skin
It’s just dying
We all gotta do it
Tune your frequencies accordingly
She’s back in the pulse
Nature repeats, why shouldn’t we?
– David Strand is an artist, writer, curator, and the Associate Curator at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA.
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MORE INFORMATION ON CLAIRE COWIE
View Exhibition
In the Vacuum, Outside the Atmosphere
View Available Work
View Video Watch List
By the Museum of Glass and the Henry Art Gallery
View Press Packet
Download Writings
By Claire Cowie, Mita Mahato and David Strand