Claire Harvey
28 May — 3 Jul 2004

Claire Harvey’s work takes the form of delicate oil paintings on canvas and on post-it notes, photographs of projected figures and objects, and installations that use light and shadow. They are quiet, unobtrusive works that meditate on fleeting moments that through both design and circumstance suddenly come to mean something, before disappearing into the hubbub and froth of daily life. In one painting, ‘The Find’ a man lies face down, carefully peering over an edge. He seems to be looking at something out of the viewer’s line of vision, excluding us from this personal epiphany. The title suggests a discovery but the subdued palette mutes any clear meaning. In a further painting ‘Doodle’, we are again distanced from the subject. A man seemingly leans over a wall having traced a single looped line all the way to the top - an impossible piece of graffiti that suggests this might be a mental rather than physical landscape. In two further pieces, each made up of two hundred or so post-it notes, stories connect, unfold and are obscured. The images seem like stills from film noir, filled with half-seen actions and moody cityscapes. Resistant to straightforward interpretation Harvey’s works evoke the private stories and discoveries that take place elsewhere, out of public sight.

‘I’m following ideas that are ephemeral...actions that have passed...moments that have gone and the accumulation of particular acts...or the accumulation of everything and nothing. I remembered a quote the other day from when I did Shakespeare for English A-level...King Lear said 'Nothing will come of nothing' but he was wrong...I think...and that maybe a whole load of nothing has the potential to be something...but that maybe it just remains as having potential... I was thinking about the post-it notes as being like everything and nothing at the same time... I’m interested in things that are meaningless but I to try to give them meaning…things that aren't going to last like with a post-it or the shadow constructions where the drawings on the projected slides merge on the wall with shadows of stuff in the space in front, making a kind of temporary picture that’s bound to disappear…things that are fragile and frozen in a particular moment.’

Claire Harvey was born in 1976. She studied at Reading University and Chelsea College of Art, and currently is a participant at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. This is her first solo exhibition. She will be exhibiting in ‘The Molecular History of Everything’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne later this year.

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