Claire van der Plas

Limited edition ChromaLuxe prints (edition of max 20 of each image)

As a painter I’ve always enjoyed capturing fine details, so it seems natural that when I decided to create some photographs, they’d be super close up. I bought a macro lens and dove into the enchanted miniature world of mosses and lichens.

I wanted to create glowing, colourful, mysterious images - photographs with an abstract, painterly quality.

With my two tiny LED variable-colour lights and my camera (and plenty of bug repellent), I spent hours losing myself in ever smaller spaces.

I hope the viewer can happily get lost for a while too in the resulting images.

Over the last several years I have painted images of rocks and water that relate to the history of mining in Colorado. These works contrast the orderliness of the grid with the organic patterns of rock and water.

Some of these paintings are exacting representations of rocks used in Leadville’s ‘Boom Days’ celebrations during which miners compete to demonstrate their drilling skills. Several of these overlay a regular taped grid from my painting process on the rougher grid of numbered squares painted on the actual rocks as part of the drilling competition. The double grids can be read as alluding to topography, the gridding out of surveyed land, numbered claims, and mined and un-mined sections of the landscape.

The paintings of water in rivers and containment ponds allude to our long history of attempts to contain and control leachate released by mining from the rocks into the water, and its subsequent unpredictable and uncontainable migration through the environment. The overlaid grids reference our attempts to control our world, both in how we think about it and how we physically alter it. These grids allude to order, mapping, dividing, and the structuring of knowledge into distinct areas.

These works are about mining, but they are also about looking, paying close attention, and the labor of painting realism. There is a meditative aspect to the slow work of painting the grain of wood, flaking paint on rough textured rocks, bent timbers in a collapsed building. It is a challenge to depict complex surfaces and spaces in the world and what is on them and beneath them, on the surface of a canvas. This is a challenge that excites and absorbs me, it is work that I find fulfilling. I hope that the viewer, in doing their part of the meaning-making work that is art, is absorbed and excited, and is prompted to think about paying attention – to the surface of the painting, but also to the surface and depths of our world, and the effects we have on it.

Portrait paintings capture not only the physical likeness of an individual but that individual’s particular presence, who they are and who they wish to be at one given moment in time, a fragmentary and temporary token in social exchange. Painted portraits always betray a certain tendency toward role-play, for both the artist and the person depicted.

For the 888 Friends project I use photographs that people have chosen and uploaded to represent themselves on the social networking website Facebook as my subject matter. In these photographs the subjects often appear very conscious of role-playing or posing to present a temporary or partial identity. They store more than one image and swap them from time to time, updating their public identity according to mood. Some use stand-ins such as pets, children or objects instead of photographs of themselves. Some people use pseudonyms. Some of the images seem startlingly frank and open while some give nothing away. The possibility of the image being a misleading representation or a fiction is also always present.

My works between 2005 and 2008 all stemmed from a love of Agricultural & Pastoral Society shows and a long standing, if unrealistic, desire to try country life. Combining images from these shows with romantic landscapes by Stubbs, Fragonard, Constable, Landseer and others, I created oddball fragments of rural utopias. The resulting mix is a sometimes uneasy dreamscape of country life.

As with dreams – both sleeping and waking – the stories and images can take on a life of their own in the drawing process. I combine different characters and backgrounds until an image coalesces that seems to tell part of a story. Quite what the story is remains open with the viewer free to take it in their own direction.

Real and unreal are intertwined in these paintings. The realism of the carefully rendered details is countered by the strangeness of the combinations and the romanticized landscapes. The scenes are painted on bedheads, tabletops and other wooden objects from thrift stores. This adds another thread of ‘realness’ to the weave and their shapes often help in choosing the image combinations and determining composition. Meanwhile the landscape settings are many steps removed from reality – scanned from books these images from other countries and other times are cropped and depopulated to serve as backdrops for new dramas.

Landed Gentry was exhibited at Oedipus Rex Gallery, Auckland, NZ, in 2007

Best in Show was exhibited at Oedipus Rex gallery, Auckland, NZ in 2006.

Cropped was exhibited at Stanbeth House Gallery in Auckland, NZ in 2005

Over the years, when the opportunity has presented itself, I have enjoyed doing various  installation works.