Claire Roberts’ prints are colourful explorations of portraiture and the conventions of beauty.
Portraiture has been used for centuries to express the qualities of the sitter - or how the sitter might wish to be perceived. For the male subject the qualities expressed were of wealth, power, importance or virtue, but for the female appearance was all. Adorned and embellished in the style of the time, they would be mainly prized for their beauty.
Claire Roberts takes these conventions and subtly subverts them to produce enigmatic portraits; these are not images of “real” people but character studies. They capture moments in time, yet are timeless. They are intentionally highly decorative works, but the characters they create are not passive and may confront or deliberately avoid your gaze.
Her complex reductive relief prints evolve through the drawing, mark making, cutting and layering of colour upon colour.
