Current Exhibition Details

FATHOM documents a voyage. In October last year, I was one of ten women and men invited to participate in the Caselburg Trust’s inaugural Breaksea Residency - a 'waterborne' adventure in remote Western Fiordland aboard Ruth and Lance Shaw’s conservation yacht, the Breaksea Girl. The diverse group included composer Gillian Whitehead, jeweler Lynn Kelly, film maker Mark Orton, visual artists Wayne Seyb, Marilynn Webb and Nigel Brown, artist-writers Greg O’Brien and Claire Beynon and poets Alan Roddick and Glenn Colquhoun. FATHOM began as an exploration of this experience, combining responses to the dramatic environment (where it rained and stormed with considerable alacrity!) with a plea for its preservation. The images on this exhibition reference Fiordland’s unique history, its mythology and stories; they distill conversations and relationship dynamics, allude to future collaborative potentials. 

The ‘particular’ boat sailed on - as every good boat must - beyond the personal and out into wider, universal waters to encompass our shared life journey with its common denominator of detours and challenges, moments of joy, anguish, love, loss, discovery, transformation and learning.

There are some exciting new developments in this work, some of which are so subtle and allusive as to make them nigh impossible to photograph. An extra layer of imagery and text is etched into each sheet of glass. Glass is, of course, an absolute necessity when working on paper, but here, it’s treated as an additional positive layer essential to each piece, rather than as a practical framing requirement. Transparency is an ideal I aspire to - both metaphorically and in ‘life lived’ so it’s been interesting to seek out new methods that would allow me to integrate the solidity and weight of drawn and painted images with the ephemeral, quasi-weightless qualities of glass; a different conversation has come into being.     

View more work by Claire Beynon