Essays

Interview with Claire Burbridge

Written by Jill Hartz Exhibition Curator and former executive director, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

In reading articles about you and your work, I learned that you have always considered yourself to be an artist and that you almost never considered another profession. Would you explain what you mean?

It was never a conscious decision to be an artist, I just happen to be that, like a cat is a cat. I also never came across any resistance from the adults in my life, just encouragement and enthusiasm. As far as having any other profession, it would be impossible because of the hierarchical nature of “careers.” I don’t think I’m much of a team player either.

It seems an unusual choice to go to Oxford University rather than an art school. Would you share your reasons for that? You did go on to art school after Oxford, and how did that experience support your artistic training?

The degree at Oxford was very appealing, as it included all art disciplines, including history of art and the study of anatomy, with a beautifully surface dissected corpse at our disposal. They had a phenomenal visiting tutor roster, with people like Damien Hirst coming and giving tutorials. They only took 20 students a year. I was at Magdalen College and the deciding factor for me applying there was the lending of Dylan Thomas’s writing studio in the Deer Park to the third-year Fine Art student; pretty cushy! There was also a generous materials stipend each term. We were absolutely spoilt! After that, I went to Camberwell College of Arts in London for my master’s and specialized in fine art printmaking for two years—a more down-to-earth experience that led to my love of drawing and collecting prints.

What brought you to the attention of your gallerist Nancy Toomey and how has a gallery supported your work?

I met Nancy through an American artist, Monroe Hodder, who was living in London. The gallery wanted to do a show of emerging London-based artists; Monroe curated that show, which I was included in back in 2003. The gallery has given me numerous solo shows, taken my work to art fairs all over this country and Europe, sold my work into collections and obtained commissions. They allowed me to go through an evolution of style and medium. It’s a significant and much appreciated relationship.

You focused earlier in your career on sculpture, but now you are creating two-dimensional work. How did that happen?

When I moved to America, the flow of my work was interrupted, which was a welcome break and enabled a reassessment of everything. The upshot was a decision to go back and revisit what I had always loved doing the most, which was drawing, the basics, pen and paper.

Your relationship with “nature” is both straightforward in the sense that you are in the midst of nature where you live and are looking at nature closely every day, but your work is much more than an interpretation of nature. Am I on the right track? How would you explain it?

You are on the right track. It’s something like discovery, where what you see is the starting point of a journey to a new perceiving mode. I’m wary of putting words to it in case I diminish the experience for the viewer.

Some of the works in the exhibition are paired, almost like diptychs. Do you see them as exploring two sides of existence? I’m also wondering if that connects in some way to being a twin?

I’m exploring conscious and subconscious, light and dark, appreciating how one can’t exist without the other, form to the formless, pathways to the invisible. I’m sure everything connects to me being a twin; my twin, Dominic, a renewable energies consultant, is also connected to nature on the side of saving it.

How did you get interested in wallpaper and what does it allow you to do that you can’t or aren’t doing in your other work?

I have alway taken an interest in the Arts and Crafts movement and notably William Morris. I admire Bauhaus and the Wiener Werkstätte movement. I like bringing function and art together, making their relationship seamless. Wallpaper fulfills a dream to make an infinitely large drawing, so long as there is an infinitely large wall! I created my own wallpapers to act as the background for the interplay with the foreground that are my drawings. It’s also a way of sharing my art on a mass scale. I really enjoy making the whole of my environment an artwork; essentially, our house is an installation, ever changing as fresh ideas emerge.

How do the smaller pieces relate to the larger works? Are you trying something out or are they complete in their own way?

The smaller drawings usually start as trying something out and end up becoming works in their own right. I like things to be filled in and pushed to their conclusion.

You were recently awarded an Oregon Percent for Art commission at Western Oregon University. Tell us about that project.

If I were to imagine my perfect commission, it would be this one. I am in the process of doing all of the artworks to go in a Mid-century modern, designated natural sciences building. I will complete six framed drawings and design a wallpaper for them. Two of the drawing are 8’x 48”. It’s perfectly demanding and pushing me to excel. Evolution needs a little adversity. The broad connecting theme of the works is evolution and time, time being what I am pushed for!

The Call of the Wild

Written by Jill Hartz Exhibition Curator and former executive director, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

For me, Claire Burbridge’s exquisitely detailed and mesmerizingly beautiful drawings are meditative exercises. At first, I appreciate their structural complexity, based seemingly on a combined natural and cosmic geometry, which is then overlaid with biological exactitudes and biomorphic or celestial imaginings. I start with the familiar, recognizing the sources of Burbridge’s creations—trees, flowers, plants, fungi, insects, and more. Those versed in the natural world may actually be able to identify these objects of study before they morph from realistic depictions into heightened realities.

I am slowly drawn in and meander from line to line, dot to dot. I take my time, exploring the rich variety of forms and interconnected routes. Soon, I leave the subjects of the composition behind and enter their elemental parts. Gradually, I find my way, my path, into the unknown. “My works,” says the artist, “aim to draw attention to the mysteries of the physical world.”

Claire Burbridge: Pathways to the Invisible features works created from 2015 to the present in graphite, colored pencil, and ink and in varied scale, from intimate studies to monumental drawings to a wallpaper wall based on the artist’s research into the medicinal plants that grow outside her Ashland, Oregon, home. Among the works on view are new pieces informed by a recent visit to Iceland and a state Percent for Art Western Oregon University commission as well as a case of actual objects that inspire her practice.

Born in London in 1971, Burbridge grew up on the west coast of Scotland and in rural Somerset. She studied art at Oxford University and pursued graduate studies at Camberwell College of Arts in London. For many years, she produced sculptural pieces, but, in 20l0, when she relocated to Ashland, she returned to drawing and the study of nature. A wild nature greets her each morning at her hilltop home, whose backyard offers vistas of mountain ranges, unkempt gardens, and untamed creatures.

I thank the artist for sharing her vision and works with us; Nancy Toomey, her San Francisco gallerist, for her advice and support; and private collectors for lending the major piece Schöner Wald. Emily Shinn, JSMA Curatorial Extern in American and European Art, impressed me with her intellect, insights, and writings, when she was still a graduate art history student at the university, and I am grateful for her contribution to this publication. As always, the professionalism and creativity of the JSMA staff are evident in the handsome installation and catalog design. I am indebted to a dear friend who wishes to remain anonymous for creating the Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art, which makes projects like this a happy reality.

Portals to an Elemental Universe

Written by Emily Shinn, JSMA Curatorial Extern in American and European Art

For Claire Burbridge, art is a journey of discovery intimately tied to her environment. After training as a printmaker at Camberwell College of Art in London in the early 1990s, she worked as a mixed-media artist and sculptor in the city, influenced, in part, by the urban landscape. Since her move to Ashland, Oregon, in 2010, the natural world has served as her primary source of inspiration and enlightenment. The lush vegetation and biological diversity surrounding her home not only rekindled a sincere love of nature cultivated during her youth in Scotland, but also her earliest artistic practice of drawing. Regardless of scale, from her large wallpapers to her intimate studies, dynamic marks of pen, graphite, and colored pencil distill the visible world into mesmerizing patterns that express an innate connection between varied realms of existence: plant, animal, mineral, human, and even cosmological.

Burbridge’s work expresses a continuity and balance essential to the cycles of life, decay, and rebirth that underlie all ecosystems. Intricate detail and technical precision–at the visual heart of each piece–invite viewers to look closely and thereby recognize the immersive dedication and intuitive empathy with which Burbridge approaches her environment. Hers are far more than scientific copies or botanical illustrations. Each drawing is a mirror to worlds both foreign and familiar, magnifying the often-unobserved systems of fragility and strength, intelligent order, and spontaneous beauty that await us at every step in the natural world.

Burbridge procures conceptual and material inspiration from direct contact with nature, observing the seasonal transitions of sunflowers and herbs in her backyard garden and exploring the manicured wilderness, wildflowers, and forest fields during daily walks in nearby Lithia Park. Frequent hikes on Mount Ashland and Grizzly Peak provide further opportunities for discovering and collecting new species of plant life. The works in the exhibition showcase these subjects to which she continually returns: fungi and lichen, leaves and flowers, trees, medicinal plants, seeds, and spores. Samples of these are featured in a gallery vitrine. Souvenirs from her walks and travels, they invite close engagement as they take on the power of totemic muses in the artist’s daily life.

Her Talisman studies explore some of these objects up close. Burbridge pays special attention to the venation (vein systems) of each leaf, mindful of the human eye’s innate attraction to pattern. Mesmerizing networks of lines and dots cascade in the backgrounds of her drawings like fields of energy, against which the leaves appear to pulse with life. Insects have torn windows through vascular tissue, creating surreal visions that seem to hint at invitations to an alien world. Through the act of drawing, Burbridge studies and then preserves her talismans in a liminal state between growth and decay.

Though she cannot bring them home with her, other than through photographs, trees provide a similar environment of enchantment. The dense network of birch trees in Schöner Wald (Beautiful Forest), which are perfectly suited for large-scale drawings and wallpaper, create an immersive environment that elides the boundary between fantasy and reality, exterior and interior space. Delicately colored fungi captivate the eye against columns of pale bark in a sensorial translation of the artist’s experience of a forest. Viewers are invited to step into her imagination and memory, then make the space their own.

Burbridge’s wallpapers provide an ideal format to develop this experience further. Influenced by the late nineteenth century Arts and Crafts workshops of British artist William Morris (1834-96), her explorations in papered nature employ a “half-drop” technique in which the central motif is repeated in diagonals across the allotted space. Burbridge discovered the comforting flow created by this traditional pattern after troubleshooting her first wallpaper, designed around a four-plate etching of insects, which did not utilize diagonals.3 Her mature wallpapers transcend the functional yet decorative bursts of flattened nature employed by Morris and Pre-Raphaelite satellites, such as Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), a particular favorite of Burbridge, and hint at another art historical love – the immersive decorative interiors of French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Like the fringe-Symbolist, Burbridge translates nature through her own deeply personal lens, creating intimate veils that provide an intangible sense of comfort and empathetic connection between the human and natural worlds.

A more intimate triptych, Tree Studies, builds on an earlier series titled Night Garden, in which Burbridge explores the nuanced sensory experience of viewing the natural world at night. Chromatic blooms of moss, lichen, and mushroom species adorn the soft layers of bark and radiate with light against the black paper. Though modeled from reality, each tree becomes an otherworldly ecosystem that glows with secrets awakened after dark. Constellations of insects, pollen, and spores glitter in whirling patterns that hint of even smaller worlds awaiting exploration.

Meticulous structures underlie all of Burbridge’s work. She begins with a compass and ruler, divining geometric systems of triangles, circles, and lines with infinite possibilities.5 The patterns provide stability for the eye and express her conviction that the same fundamental designs govern, and thus connect, all living entities, from earthly spores to celestial dust. Her mathematical foundations are particularly striking in Individuation Point. Viewers can follow her own act of discovery by tracing the lines that radiate through the delicately colored stria of fungi, receding to and from the central “individuation” point in seemingly endless patterns of triangles and circles. In a more macrocosmic exploration of structure, the pulsing tension of the effectively titled Laocoön (referencing the ancient marble sculpture of Greek myth and the Trojan War, Laocoön and His Sons, excavated in 1506) radiates against a visible cosmic web that correlates with visual theories of quantum physics. Beneath the absorbing aesthetic punch of pattern and color lingers an optimistic celebration of the infinite expanse and dependable, sustainable strength of nature.

Smaller drawings provide a glimpse into the microcosms of this web. A pair of Diatoms (singlecelled algae) explore the elemental structures of an ancient organism that is essential to all life on earth. Diatoms produce fifty percent of the world’s oxygen, help to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and are one of the most abundant food sources for underwater

creatures. In these intimate portraits, Burbridge brings viewers to the eye of a microscope. Merging the scientific and subjective, she transforms the diatom’s transparent cell walls – made of intricately patterned webs of opaline silica – into ethereal crystalline constellations. The geometric structures of each cell are observed in the spherical and elliptical architecture, but, as with her forests and fungi, Burbridge mediates reality through her own vision and senses. Little more than collections of glowing dots, her diatoms seem to express the organism’s need for light to survive. The shimmering forms invite wonder and awe at their purpose and potential; how might we be connected to these important organisms and what does their delicacy and strength have to teach us?

Burbridge begins every piece with an awareness that nature is integral to human life. Plants are biologically driven to convert the life-giving energy of the sun into nutrients. Every type of vegetal species has something to offer in the form of shelter, nourishment, and healing. The dense monochromatic landscapes of Graphite Garden and Dandelions engage with the organic abundance of the artist’s backyard terraces, in which medicinal plants grow freely. Burbridge is keenly attuned to the ancient wisdom and healing properties of these edible roots, leaves, and flowers, dismissed by many domestic gardeners as little more than irksome weeds. The close-up perspective and cropping bring viewers into direct contact with this world of grey flora. Beckoning with a stillness and quiet similar to the artist’s forest studies, the drawings offer a visual and spiritual respite from the dissonant fray of the human world.

In addition to the tenacious dandelion – offering a rich collection of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals ideal for treating everything from anemia and IBS to kidney, gallbladder, and blood sugar issues – the graphite vegetation includes mullein, clover, wood sorrel, mint, sage, nettle, and common mallow. Each species offers a cornucopia of nutrients and can be transformed into tinctures, teas, and topical poultices: tonics for the heart, the mind, and the blood; for respiratory illnesses and asthma; bruises, rashes, and insect bites; arthritis and inflammation; nausea, fevers, and colds; stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Burbridge honors the knowledge embedded in these plants, familiar to ancient cultures around the world. She learns their histories and power through the act of drawing and integrates them into her daily life, stocking her kitchen with bundles of dried herbs and homemade tinctures.

Continuing this effortless integration of nature into her creative and domestic space, one of her dream projects is to create interiors that fully, seamlessly integrate the natural world with daily life. What if the walls, carpet, light fixtures, furniture, and artwork could transport you to the interior of a cave, the healing shelter of a colossal garden, or the silent heart of a forest? Such future plans are the ideal culmination of Burbridge’s rare ability to merge a scientific attention to detail with a somatic, sensorial, and deeply subjective creative process. The result is a mature oeuvre that mediates between the human and natural worlds, past and present, and her own emotional needs and expressive goals. Art and life intertwine as nature and creativity become synonymous, offering reciprocal lessons in curiosity and innovation, letting go and transition, optimism and resilience.

On Circles, Lines and Spirals, the work of Claire Burbridge

Written by Tod Davies

Once upon a time, somewhere around the end of the almost certainly somnolent Neolithic age, human beings got restless. Life seemed to be a closed circle, going ‘round and ‘round with nothing new appearing on the horizon. Then something new did happen. The Heroic Path appeared. And it was good. It was dynamic. It led somewhere, not just in the seemingly endless round of village life, a life, it must have seemed, that was Life in Death. It was a straight line aimed at a goal, and that goal was to conquer Death.

But this was an illusion, that this was the final road. Generations followed generations, and after many centuries, some began to note that the Heroic Path involved problems of its own. Heading so straight ahead started to look like heading into a dead end. For life of any kind doesn’t follow a circle or a straight line: it circles up. A spiral. DNA spirals. Cycles spiral. Our world changes. Our needs change. Our visions change to suit the change in our needs. And always, at the forefront, sending messages back, is the art and literature of the time, sending code, sending new symbols, new maps, sending out—for those with eyes to see—new ways of being. New worlds. For new worlds are possible. Not just possible…inevitable. New paths appear. And new worlds spiral up out of the old.

You look at Claire Burbridge’s work, and it may be at first glance you think these pieces too delicate, exquisite almost, too emotional…too (let’s be frank) female to be able to carry on its patient shoulders a knapsack stuffed with maps of the secret spirals up to a possible new world. But look a little closer. There’s an old world there at the bottom of these images, a very old world sculpted with some very old pathways. There’s the secret: the roads to the new branch out of the old. These are paths reaching out from very old roads indeed.

These new roads are not those of the heroic journey, though they branch from it naturally, on their way spiraling up. They are byways of an every day life that humans have traveled for millennia. A life that is too often overlooked in that straight ahead mad freeway rush hour that hurtles toward a yearned-for novelty, extreme innovation and, yes, for an unattainable immortality. For new life passes through death on its way spiraling up from the old: the life contained in fairy tales, in legends, in myths, in all the circular rooms spiraling in the collective unconscious, containing the innermost desires of the human race.

The desire for unity with Nature. The wish for harmony. The need for connection, of subject with object, and of subject with subject. The pleasure of feasting with fellows. The beauty of the imperfect. The beauty of ends that lead to beginnings.

Community. Connection. The Life that comes out of Death and returns to it, only to return again.

Nature, wordless, lifting us in a spiral cycle of suffering and joy.

The good life, which is the human life. To try to escape that human life is no longer the heroic quest, but the path that leads nowhere, to nothing, to the Dead Wood that never reanimates. To the Wasteland.

And what do we have here? We have images of an eternal return accepted, of a life bursting out vibrant in those smallest parts that make the ever-moving larger whole. The suffering that leads to joy and back again. The connection between all things, between all fellows. The life that comes from death. The sprouting of green with the healing of the king.

Look again, you’ll see that what I say is true. All there, drawn with the kind of delicate strokes made by a meditative and precise mind. More than a mind: made by a discipline rooted in the feeling of love for a beautiful imperfect world. Which is the root of a true art. For while perfection is an end, imperfection renews. And leads to the future.

If we’re to have a future, we’ll be needing some renewal. I think we’re all agreed on that.

If we’re to have a future, we need artists who are in love with the world to draw the paths to our goal. Those paths spiral up through suffering, the kind of unavoidable suffering that we humans in our blindness think it heroic to attempt to defeat. But other routes may show us a way past those terrible wastelands of avoidable suffering, those cul de sacs of mistaken attempts at transcendence, of dominance born sluggish from pride, a false sense of being above the natural world, the delusion of being able to escape from its dynamic spiral, from a pattern we cannot control.

If we cannot control, these images by Claire Burbridge insist, we can certainly join. We can join in the dance going on around us, every day. We can partner with Nature, dancing.

We can join in the energy, dancing. We can be part of William Blake’s Eternal Delight. For there is (it’s there if you look) a transcendence in the every day, if we will only open ourselves to see. Open ourselves to agree with the poet, “Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.” That takes some courage for our still restless Western selves. Art, sly, can give us this courage, to waltz with Being, then Becoming, then Being again. To join in the eternal spiral, agreeing with it, living it. Living in a world with Life and with Death, a world, in short, where human beings can humanly dwell.

And these pieces by Claire Burbridge reveal a part of that lovely world and invite us again to dance.