Clare Henderson

Now living in Clifden, in the west of Ireland, Clare has recently been appointed Arts Coordinator for the Clifden Arts Festival. Her work has been exhibited in the Talbot Gallery, SO Fine Art Editions, Graphic Studio Gallery and the National Gallery of Ireland.

The prints

Clare’s three prints for Ipsos B&A, Night Drive 1, 2 and 3, bear rapt witness to the artist’s fond childhood memories of long night-drives between Dublin and Clifden with her parents — sometimes sleepily half-waking to look out the car window and  being enchanted by all that she saw. Her prints re-imagine the familiar forms of Connemara’s landscape from this wholly novel perspective — exploring those liminal moments between night and day, sleeping and waking, when the solid everyday reality of lakes and mountains gives way to a haunting, dream-like region of mysterious shapes and shadows, darkness and light, a magical oneiric interzone in which anything is possible and nothing is what it seems.

The technique

In order to achieve the misty light that seems to shimmer and glow from her prints, Clare combined many strata of deeply etched, coarse and grainy aquatints. Many of the printing plates used spit-bite — painting the plate with acid — which helped create her characteristic layers of soft tone. These plates were printed on top of one another, sensuously combining light and shadow to produce a uniquely atmospheric and evocative body of work.