Claire Shoosmith


Standing in a bright room, large picture windows frame swaying branches in full leaf. I’m hunched in concentration over a workbench where I attempt to assemble the components of a cow: a log, some sticks, wood shavings. I’m using a vice, a saw, a hand drill. I’m figuring out where to put the holes to insert the legs, how to make it stand up, where to stick the shavings, how to mark the face. I am completely absorbed in my task, free to explore and experiment, I am six years old. I have never forgotten the minute detail of this scene, my memory tells me that I wasn’t supervised but perhaps my focus cancelled out the presence of a teacher. My engagement was 100% and in that class my lifelong passion for art and design had begun. My mainstream state funded infant school in the seventies was a place where every afternoon was left open for us to create, be it art, music or drama, a shocking contrast to mainstream primary provision now. At home I would spend hours in my dad’s shed rummaging through odds and ends to make all sorts of ‘useful’ stuff – I built a complex insect graveyard complete with fence, chapel and headstones. Texture, pattern, colour, layers, a sense of the world around me appearing in heightened 3D are very early memories. I would study the intricate detail of tiny flowers before making very crude drawings for some reason always heavily outlined in black. I didn’t come from an artistic or particularly creative family but what I did have was the freedom to explore my environment.
I returned to college at twenty-three after three years working as a very serious civil servant who always had their eye on the exit. Making the most of the then really cheap evening classes on offer in London I put together enough work to allow me access to three amazing colleges: Camberwell, St. Martin’s and the Royal College for five years of complete focus on my art practice all funded by grants and bursaries – now this seems like a complete luxury but then it was pretty much the norm. London in the late eighties and early nineties was still full of opportunities for finding the previously undiscovered – materials, locations, people and as art students we exploited these hidden resources to the full. In my second year at St. Martin’s I came across an annexe of unused offices above the college library – a group of us moved in for the entire academic year. We enjoyed existing on the edge of the sculpture department, almost devising our own course. I had an office with a small dark store room attached, with my own space I started to make and plan more complex pieces of work including installation, performance and film. Always gathering resources from markets, jumble sales and skips I began to recognise the possibilities for using the stuff of everyday life in my work. The ability to make mistakes, to challenge preconceptions and critically evaluate my own and other’s work were key components of my time at college.
It’s a completely symbiotic relationship, moving through the three main definitions of symbiosis depending on my situation. Sometimes parasitic, sometimes of mutual benefit, sometimes operating independently. We push each other along, always with the hope of having more time to focus and experiment without distractions but also understanding that too much time can lead to paralysis and that actually I have usually made my best work when faced with an approaching deadline. Out of the college environment engaging in critical dialogue with other artists and practitioners reduces so it’s incredibly valuable to have opportunities like this interview to force me to reflect on my work.





I have resisted working in clay for years, for no great reason apart from I think it was just one of those traditional sculpture materials that I needed to understand and approach in a new way. I’m still slightly wary of it but also fascinated by the alchemy and the way that it doesn’t really behave itself, the element of surprise after its transformation in the kiln.  As part of the team setting up the ceramics workshop Eastbourne Studio Pottery based at DC2 in 2017 I now have the chance to experiment with the possibilities of the material outside of a class or college environment. I am fascinated by geological processes and in particular how sedimentary rocks describe the passage of time. Just as the lines in a cross section of a tree can map hundred’s of years of growth, the strata in a sedimentary rock can map millions of years of our history. The piece I have in the exhibition is made from combining different coloured clays to mimic this stratification, through the making process I wait for features recognisable as a face or mask to subtlety appear. The theme of this year’s members show is ‘Connections’, this piece thinks about the relationship we have with the earth and how our time on earth can ultimately be measured and assessed by what lies under our feet.



I do write a lot of notes and train journeys are fantastic opportunities for crystallising ideas. I walk to immerse myself in an environment, thinking back to that sense of heightened 3D I felt as a child. Much of my work examines our communication with and behaviour towards others, looking at the choreography of how people interact with each other, places and things. Noticing how we travel through different environments and how we make sense of being or feeling ‘out-of-place’. A concept would be a developing narrative that draws in appropriate materials and locations. The nature of the material is very important and can arise from the environment I find myself in. Manipulating materials and repurposing the stuff of everyday life; I create the props, costumes and backdrops for fictional characters that become a conduit to describe the narrative or context. I have never liked having finished work hanging around, I prefer to work with materials in an ephemeral way where a moment is captured on photo or digital media.
I think there is the potential for a richer dialogue between the viewer and the artist when a space is populated with multiple scenes or objects that sit in relationship to each other. For me it’s the analogy of walking through a hall of mirrors where the juxtaposition of elements are constantly changing and the viewer becomes part of the narrative. The exhibited art can be immersive and the process of making the work can be immersive, drawing in multiple strands and using a variety of media. My projects create situations where people are included in the process of making the work, the dialogue that this encourages and how it might shift the direction of the work are key to developing the project. Engineering collaboration between the general public and specific community groups or organisations started whilst I was working first as an artist in residence and then co-curating the summer festival at Grizedale Arts and this has continued throughout my career.


The great thing about being relocated to a completely new environment as an Artist in Residence is finding myself completely ‘out-of-place’ and having to figure out how to relate to what I find around me. Walking through the forest in Grizedale day after day noting fragments of conversations with and by other visitors I started to think about how we operate as tourists and how this compares to living a life where we do not feel the need to travel beyond our immediate environment. Being immersed in a location where the rural and tourist economy were inextricably linked I started reading about our rural heritage and was inspired to develop a project that drew attention to the interdependence of the resident community and visitors to the area. After collecting and begging for hundreds of cloth badges from suppliers and visitor attractions, I set up my own cottage industry to carry out the laborious craft involved in making the jumpers from walking socks and then hand stitching the badges according to geographical location. Over a period of three months I travelled out to over fifty locations in Cumbria to find and photograph people wearing the jumpers in more or less the locations depicted on the badges. With each portrait the dialogue with the people taking part was incredibly rich and I feel privileged to have experienced so many extraordinary encounters. Almost twenty years on with the possibilities opened up by the internet I am thinking about revisiting the project to try and track down as many of the participants as possible.



The Blue Monkey residency was an amazing opportunity to make meaningful contact with a network of artists after having spent five years living in rural France – slight wilderness years in terms of connecting with other practitioners. Not really knowing exactly how I would spend my time but knowing that I needed to just jump in and start something I took the subject of this portrait as a conduit for the narrative that was unfolding about an ‘out-of-place’ character who was becoming both a hermit and an object for public curiosity and derision.  Capturing a moment in time, a fragment of someone’s personality in a photographic portrait still holds power. The difficulty of rendering what I see is a challenge and inspiration. In a pre-digital age I used a medium format analogue camera to take all the images for the Souvenir series. There was something magical about looking down into the camera to view the image, as if a film were playing inside the viewfinder. With just twelve frames per film, careful consideration of light, composition and capturing that moment focussed my intention and concentration. Ignoring the possibilities for manipulation of both analogue and digital images I think we still generally feel that looking at a photographic portrait connects us to that person in a way that portrait painting simply doesn’t. As an artist in a school or college situation you generally have far more freedom to look at things from a completely different perspective. Without the demands on your time that an art teacher may have you can notice and react to quite random and disparate elements to develop projects and shift things in a different direction. The temporary injection of artists from a wide variety of disciplines provides the school and students with experience and skills that might not be available from the teachers in post. Artists, designers and craftspeople working in school can tangibly demonstrate the wider possibilities open to young people for future career paths with opportunities for work experience and links to the network of creative industries often created. Against the deadening tide of the EBacc which is compounding the pressure on creative subjects, already suffering as a result of the continual increase in measurement and accountability through primary and secondary education, it takes a determined head teacher and spirited art department to value and invest in meaningful arts education. All mainstream state funded schools would benefit from having a programme of artists in residence to work not just in the art department but across all subject areas, they are a common part of independently funded schools. I recently attended a two day conference on the role of the artist-teacher and the vital importance of developing visual literacy; speaker after speaker confirmed how with support from the senior leadership teams in school it is completely possible to develop a new way of working in the art department, far more responsive to the changing needs of our young people. I think I am distinctively chaotic in my approach to making art, for me this is generally positive and means that all sorts of influences and ways of working make their way into my projects. The downside is that I’m not sure I have that identifiable thing that most successful artists through history have been able to cultivate – where their work is immediately recognisable. I think I need to have a year of making the same thing to test out what might happen. I am really interested in finding somewhere like a museum or an archive of local history to work with. Looking at the collections and stories they hold to develop a piece of work that is then displayed as part of their eclectic mix of exhibits.