Rachael Clewlow

Rachael Clewlow meticulously documents the ways in which she inhabits the landscape: the routes she takes through it, the times and dates of her travels, and the methods by which, to paraphrase Warhol, she moves from A to B and back and again. Acting as a flâneur, Clewlow records both the banal and the interesting aspects of everyday life. Often walking for miles to discover a new place, an ever growing mass of information builds to document a constantly shifting world around the path she takes. Clewlow keeps a series of “statistical diaries” in which routes, traditional pathways or not, are “logged, through dedicated, almost ritualistic daily recording”. These diaries are exquisite objects in their own right. They are also, however, the source material for her pictorial inventions. Clewlow creates her own systems of ‘translation’ by which the patterns of her own mobility become abstract patterns of form and colour. She describes her process as “the organisation and presentation of related data, accumulated over years” into abstract imagery which “recalls the visual language of maps and their colour coding systems, though their graphic style belies the rigorous and precise handmade approach to making them.” Indeed, Clewlow plays with the idea that her works should be ‘functional’, deliberately making them lie on the borders of legibility: rather, her bewildering dexterity with materials and attention to the details of the pictorial surface are the real draw on our attention. Alistair Robinson, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, 2013