Fabia
Claris

I am a London-based artist working in both two and three dimensions. Born in Belfast of Australian parents, I was educated at the Lycée Français de Londres in London before doing a degree in English at New Hall, Cambridge. After graduating with a 2/1 I did a Foundation at Central School of Art and Design in London and then went on to study sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art before going on to work as an apprentice to a master carver in York. I subsequently studied anatomy at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and did two years postgraduate drawing at the Prince’s Drawing School. I combine work as a practising artist with freelance work as an art tutor, examiner and translator in the field of art and design. I have taught drawing and sculpture widely in London and elsewhere and currently run my own independent classes in London. I exhibit regularly.. Whether I work in three or two dimensions, my approach involves a mixture of construction and deconstruction. My three-dimensional work is effectively drawing in space and uses line of one sort or another to build up form. It is essentially figurative, although it has an underlying conceptual dimension and the focus is almost always people. The materials I use to build up my pieces are very important. I choose to work with recycled materials not just to avoid waste but because I want to use materials which reflect the world I live in. Unlike traditional sculptural materials like clay and bronze, the raw materials I use are ones which we all encounter every day. They are of little value and are not specifically designed to last, but rather to serve a given purpose and then be thrown away. I break them down into their component parts and re-assemble them to create a material and language of my own, appropriate to the time and place to which I belong, piecing them together, layering, gluing, cutting into them using simple and direct methods which draw on female textile traditions of weaving and tying, and more recently, sewing. Many of my recent pieces have incorporated plastics of different kinds as well as discarded, broken umbrellas and other found materials, many of which are not obviously easy to shape. I have been using recycled plastic milk bottles to create an ongoing series of larger than life-size portrait heads called Fish Lamb exploring ideas of identity and disintegration, seeing how far I can push the material and adapt it to traditional sculptural modelling techniques, while using basic and non traditional tools (a glue gun and Stanley knife).Structure is always central to my work. My aim is to convey meaning through the way each piece is constructed. This is particularly important in Fish Lamb. The first in the series of portrait heads, Whole and human, is a whole head, constructed cohesively from the inside out. Based on a cast from this but undermined and worked on, the second, Not quite right, lacks the essential structural unity of a whole and is designed to convey disintegration.