For Clare (Claudie) Caldwell, art is the initial impulse, a filter through which to decipher subliminal, pre-cognitive and cognitive responses to her inner and outer worlds, a way of making sense of and sharing ‘conversations’ about things that are important. In Time is an allegorical narrative of paintings on Angelic intervention: its arrival, its absence and its re-intervention.

The exhibition is a response to the imagery that has mentally and spiritually bombarded the artist, often seemingly random, but now forming a cohesive whole. It has an urgency about it. It seems it is a story that wants to be told.

Clare believes one of the roles of the artist is to ask the hard questions, to challenge established beliefs, like a societal watchdog. In a world currently dominated by the cult of the decadent, the ugly and the secular, art has largely abandoned its role of transcending these dystopias and connecting us to an ‘otherness’ – a connection to what is Divine, that connects to the Divine within us.

It is a loss that severs what she believes to be the pursuit of our sacred purpose on this planet.

In Time opens on Saturday 18 August, from 2pm
In Time will be available to view from Saturday 18 August – Monday 3 September 2018.

Clare Caldwell

Clare Caldwell is a well-known and much loved art tutor at the Auckland City Mission where she has taught painting for 3 years.  In June 2016 she was awarded TVNZ’s ‘Good Sorts’ award  https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/good-sorts-woman-started-art-class-homeless) for this important work.

She played a big part in organising two successful exhibitions at Depot Artspace in Devonport, the most recent taking place in May, alongside an international travelling exchange of work by homeless artists which she and her UK-based daughter Sarah Caldwell-Watson brought together.

As well as being a practising artist, Clare is also an art therapist, working from her home studio in west Auckland, where she lives with partner Sean, an assemblage artist and photographer. She returns to the Depot on August 18th for her first solo exhibition at the artspace.