Ceramics Resident: Clare Twomey

Clare Twomey, Ceramics Resident at the V&A, June - January 2012

Clare Twomey was the V&A's Ceramics Artist in Residence from April–November 2011. Clare is a British artist and a research fellow at the University of Westminster who works with clay in large-scale installations, sculpture and site-specific works. Over the past 10 years she has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, Crafts Council, Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Japan, the Eden Project and the Royal Academy of Arts. Within these works Twomey has maintained her concerns with materials, craft practice and historic and social context.

Visit Clare Twomey's blog

Biography

Is it madness. Is is beauty. (2010), Clare Twomey. Photographer M J Kelly

Clare Twomey is a British artist and a research fellow at the University of Westminster who works with clay in large-scale installations, sculpture and site-specific works. Over the past 10 years she has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, Crafts Council, Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, the Eden Project and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Clare Twomey's installations have the social and historical context in which the installation is created as their point of departure. Often they exist only within these frameworks. A number of her installations disappear or perish in the course of the exhibition period as part of her work. Often the onlooker's mode of behaviour is conceptually included in Twomey's works. This, for example. applied to the artwork 'Conscience/Consciousness' (2003), in which Twomey had covered the floor of the gallery with very thin ceramic tiles which broke when trodden on.

At the Brighton Pavilion she housed thousands of black butterflies that became a veil of mourning in amongst the ornate rooms of the Pavilion creating a discussion about the indulgence and excess of the building and its creation.

At the Royal Academy she worked with traditional flower makers in Stoke on Trent to make hundreds of exotic flowers in a work titled Specimen, which interrogated the protection and destruction of objects. The flowers were not fired and exposed to the touch of visitors throughout the exhibition. Their vulnerability reflected on the disappearance of traditional craft skills in Stoke on Trent.

Clare Twomey is actively involved in critical research in the area of the applied arts, including writing, curating and making. She has developed work which expands the fields' knowledge of larger scale installation works.

Supported by William & Valerie Brake and Maurice & Rosemary Lambert

Monument (2009), Clare Twomey, MIMA. Photographer Dan Prince

Trophy (2006), Clare Twomey, Victoria and Albert Museum. Photographer Dan Prince.

Forever (2010), Clare Twomey, The Nelson Atkins Museum. Photographer B Greenspan.

Specimen (2010), Clare Twomey, The Royal Academy. Photographer M J Kelly