Claire Beynon

Welcome to the surreal world of Antarctica - through the eyes and words of Dunedin artist and poet Claire Beynon. In a new series of artworks in a variety of media, she brings this ethereal world into sublime reality for those of us not yet lucky enough to visit Antarctica.

As suggested by the exhibition title, Where There is Ice, There is Music, Claire found "silence has a voice" - in the rebel wind, in the cracking ice, in the soul of a place well suited to her very spiritual work.

Silence here is both aural and spatial. It is silence with a presence and a voice. Rocks stand mute, but the ice has a wide repertoire of sounds. You have only to kneel among the cracks and fissures to tune into its songs. - excerpt from the artist's notebooks, Antarctica 2005.

She also gives it a voice within an enchanting limited-run volume Open Book, published by Steele Roberts, combining her lyrical poetry and images, which we are delighted to be launching at the opening of her exhibition. This work defies usual expectations of a book, being without pagination, giving the impression of a continuous page, evoking place and sensations. Claire has won awards for her poetry, and these are collected poems, not only of the Antarctic experience, but before and since.

Claire's venture to Antarctica differed from many artists - she worked her passage to the ice with an American scientific research team and had to fit her artistic note-taking around work as a 'field assistant' in the study of ancient, exquisite single-celled organisms (forams). The opportunity arose after New York scientist Dr Sam Bowser encountered her artworks in Christchurch and invited her to join the team.

Her work embraces both the broad view and the intricately microscopic - quite breathtaking work. It includes the pastels for which she is best known, together with several other media - including acrylic and wax on canvas, ink and gesso on paper. This Fragile Earth takes an intimate view of the myriad colours of the ice at various stages of solidity, printed in archival inks and worked with pastel to create a meditative mandala, implying the lens of the microscope. After the scientists had finished with the tiny forams, the artist took some of the material outside and using tweezers, laid them on to the ice like fine drawings, photographed these and incorporated them into the work. She cut into the final printed work in a maze-like pattern suggestive of the way one has to choose a safe path across the ice, sometimes doubling back; the work was then laid over vylene so these lines a visible like threads of ice. A large work in this series, 1.5 x 1.8m, will be available soon, using the same lithographic montage of photographic images as the foundation, although each in the series is different.

* A phrase mark indicates a passage (of music) that should be played legato. Legato is an Italian word meaning smooth.

** Katabatikos - (orig. Greek, literally meaning "going downhill"). A catabatic wind blows down a topographic incline such as a hill or mountain, travelling at considerable speed and impacting significantly on the land across which it moves. In the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, it carves rock and ice into dramatic sculptural formations.


 

More About the Artist 

Claire Beynon has lived and worked in Dunedin for the past decade, having studied fine arts in South Africa and London. She is best known for her large scale pastels on paper, testing the boundaries of those media; The thought-provoking work of this collectible artist has been exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and overseas.

For more background on the artist please email me at info@thediversiongallery.co.nz

Click on the images on this page for further details and prices of works still available. The volume Open Book is available from the gallery at $50, and a selection of poems with images from the book will be reproduced as very limited edition prints, please enquire.
 

Please contact us to confirm current prices: most prices are posted at the time of exhibition, and may be revised as the artists’ values increase.