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Clara Adolphs

On a cloudless Autumn morning, Clara Adolphs meets me in her Southern Highlands studio, where we chat for hours about life, art, temporality, motherhood, and the imaginary world that has contoured her career.

Growing up the youngest of three sisters in the northern parts of suburban Sydney, Clara Adolphs was largely left to her own devices. With fertile imagination, she hatched a fictitious world – what she named her “natural game” – as a place to escape and explore. Today, it seems, Adophs is still playing her “natural game,” creating painterly portals that sweep us into worlds near and far.

Clara’s inspirations are diverse, from Chantel Joffe, Salman Toor and David Hockney to Vincent Namatjira, Patti Smith, Edouard Manet, and Henry Taylor. I spot cadences of these artists – the fluid strokes of Manet, the agile figuration of Joffe, the candid poetry of Smith – but Adolphs’s artistic vocabulary is expressly her own. For over a decade, she has carved out a singular aesthetic that – although her subjects are simple enough, familiar enough – is somehow difficult to articulate. Nostalgic? Uncanny? Wistful? There is a push and pull at play, a beckoning for connection between the past and the present, yet a certain imperviousness to it at the same time.

Working mostly from old black and white photographs, Adolphs invents her palette of stormy greys, subterranean blues and smokey greens. As we talk in her studio, I suggest that her colours feel melancholy, stirring, which seems to surprise her. Her relationship to the past, to moments lapsed and people gone, isn’t one of loss. “I like to think that everything exists all at once. Or everything that has existed, still exists,” she explains. She ponders for a second, “I used to think it was nostalgia, but I’m not glorifying the past.” For Clara, time is not linear, for the past replays in the present through a shared thread of humanity, some inexplicable essence that she captures in bucolic scenes of leisure, rest, social gatherings, children playing outdoors. She relates her paintings to the phenomenological reflections of Roland Barthes, who posits photographs as markers of presence; not absence. The figurative mass in Human Shadows (Mountain), 2022, proclaims its presence with force. The sweeping, spectral alps in the distance mirror the hard-edged human mountain, each charged with the same current of immortality. These people are not shadows, as the title suggests, but vestiges of history resurrected by the timeless light of Adolphs’s brush. Human Shadows (Mountain) shows us how Adolphs’s paintings can be read as mementos – not the mori kind, but soft celebrations of life, living and reliving. They speak of temporal continuity and contiguity, a sort of ahistoricity that positions the viewer to feel simultaneously small and significant.

“I’m still trying to understand why I’m drawn to old photographs,” Clara tells me. The symbiosis of painting and photography in her practice is seeded in the countless albums kept by her father, a keen photographer. As a child she would spend hours flicking through them, and soon she began painting the images as a gesture of connection, of bringing imaginary life to the faces of strangers and distant family. This practice blossomed at art school at the University of New South Wales, when Adolphs began collecting photographs from thrift stores and online. Foraging for imagery has since become a pivotal part of her artmaking; “Half of my practice is about finding what to paint.” Some days in the studio are filled with trawling though photographic archives, an endless mission driven not by a search for subject but a search for light – much like the way of the photographer.

The artist’s inflated plays of light imbue her subjects with a sheen, their bodies haloed with an otherworldly, almost clinical glow. No golden sunlight suffuses her outdoor scenes, nor warm lamplight in her interiors; rather, a crisp white creates a note of theatricality, each figure in the spotlight ready to play its part. In Silent Reply (Group I), stark lighting and wedges of negative space create strange luminescent masks that recall the inverse tonalities of photographic negatives. In this work (and others) large sections of white canvas become cracks in the scene; fissures in memory that foment a dance of fullness and emptiness. Up close, crudely sketched scaffolds in watercolour pencil are visible on the sections of unpainted canvas, which, Clara remarks, she intentionally leaves as skeletons of process.

These formal clues are flecked throughout Adolphs’s paintings, exposing an artist who seeks to quietly declare herself, her way of thinking and her mode of creating. Recently she has been including in her exhibitions two versions of the same subject, which give us a glimpse into the conscious repetition of her process – where multiple iterations are painted, over and over again, in an obsessive endeavour to capture their “essence.” In Clara’s studio, layers of unstretched canvas are stacked and stapled behind each final piece. She flicks through these previous versions like pages in a giant flipbook, each image a beautiful echo of the other. “You probably think I’m crazy!” she laughs, before covering them up again. Paired works such as Silent Reply (woman I) and Silent Reply (woman II), 2023, reveal the power of nuance. In the first painting, a visceral palette of twilight pinks and fleshy browns conjures a balmy sensualness, the woman’s soft skin and quivering sea behind her tinted by the final rays of the setting sun. The same woman in the partner piece seems more distant than the first, receding from the viewer into a choppy ocean of private introspection. Frosty blues and wintry tones sever us from sentimentality or nostalgia. Look closely and you’ll notice more white canvas in this work – a network of fragmented vectors that prevents our eyes from settling, thwarting optical comfort.

As Clara and I stand at the entrance to her home studio, our toddlers play at our feet. We speak about the hyper-efficient times of motherhood – how she has no time to deliberate or procrastinate anymore, how she is quick to make decisions in her work. There is a performative element to her way of working, a physicality that sees the artist spinning around her studio, orchestrating paint rapidly while it’s “alive.” She paints with oils on unstretched linen stapled to the wall, not knowing where the boundaries of the painting will be until she’s finished. She abandons a painting if it’s not working in that moment, but she never destroys it, for there is always the glimmer of resurrection. It is natural, then, that great movement can be felt in her art, an energy and immediacy that belies the stillness of her subjects. In Silent Reply (Mountain), 2023, tectonic plates of paint mingle on the canvas as if coalescing before our eyes. The rugged architecture of Adolphs’s brushstrokes is laid bare in this mountain mosaic, she says she prefers the tooth and grit of lo-fi tools – cheap palette knives and synthetic brushes from two-dollar shops that derail the possibility of finesse. Similarly, by recreating small sized photographs on a large-scale, the artist intentionally misplaces detail to nurture micro abstractions, compositional voids and painterly pixels. It soon becomes apparent to me that Clara is a purist, forever searching for the essence of her referents, equipping herself with tools and techniques that quarry the past.

While landscapes were once backdrops for Adolphs’s figurative subjects, the past couple of years has seen the artist focussing more on this genre, beginning with her Cumulus series of 2021. The transience and flux of clouds, as a solo subject, complimented the immediacy of her process whilst being rich in metaphor. In Christmas Cloud, 2022 – a finalist in the Wynne Prize – Adolphs freezes a fleeting moment in a continually-shifting cumulus congestus. Wafers of white canvas are met with a frenzied brush in muffled blues and greys, as the monumentality dissipates.

Adolphs has painted a number of identifiable portraits but mostly focuses on anonymity. Her subjects form fictional players in her “natural game,” moving between series to create an expanding universe. From different photographs, the figures in Your Own Fiction, 2023, enact a reimagined gathering that deepens Adolph’s pictorial engagement with the anonymous. Not only unknown to the viewer, these people are foreign to each other – signalled by the clashing formalities of their attire, and the tacit awkwardness of their placement. They are spatially close yet psychologically estranged, looking through each other into worlds entirely their own. Silence curtains this scene; no one speaks, everyone is still, and solitude settles like powder on their sharply illuminated physiognomies. This gesture of uniting the anonymous; this artificial connective tissue so characteristic of Adolphs’s approach, courses across her output via thematic and compositional repetition. Earlier works such as Floating and Little Blue (both 2017) converse with the swimming paintings in her 2021 One Eye Open collection through the primal trope of water. There is something in its mesmeric reflections hedged by Adolphs’s crystalline contrasts that slips us between the past and present with liquid ease.

I search for a surface to put down my glass of water in Clara’s studio, but only see summits of brushes, still-wet palettes, gnarly paint tubes, packets of baby wipes, rubber gloves, plastic water jars, boxes of books and corridors of rolled-up canvases. “My studio is a mess, always will be.” Though sometimes having a home studio can feel a little unhealthy and isolating, the artist explains, she ultimately likes to be close to her paintings. “Sometimes if I can’t sleep, I’ll get up in the middle of the night and work . . . it’s like a religion to me. But it’s also a compulsion.”

As we leave the dizzying scent of oil, and step out into the crisp autumnal air where our toddlers are rolling around on the grass, we chat about the future – of both life and art. Now that her son is past the baby stage, Clara says, her work is becoming more ambitious. “It’s only when I look back on my work that I see how far I’ve come, how I’ve developed. Sometimes I think each exhibition is just a better version of the last, continually honing that world that I like to create with my work.”

Images courtesy of the artist, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide, and Chalk Horse, Sydney 
This profile was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 63

EXHIBITION
Together Again
13 July – 1 September 2024
Ngununggula, NSW

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