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
(b.1984)
Clewlow was born in Middlesbrough, UK and is now based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She graduated from Newcastle University with a Fine Art BA in 2007.
Through painting and printmaking Clewlow has created a visual language that reflects an obsessive desire to map out and document her own experiences of the world. Her work follows a tradition of reductive abstract painting, informed by the aesthetics of cartographic design but shaped by her love of colour.
She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including museum exhibitions at Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans Sartoux, France and mima, Middlesbrough, UK . Her work is held in private and public collections, including The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK and Rochdale Arts and Heritage Collection, Rochale, UK.
Solo Exhibitions
Tees Colour Register, Platform A, Middlesbrough, 2025
3200 Colours, Vane Gallery, Newcastle, 2018
My Paths Are My Ideas of Imagination, Touchstones, Rochdale touring to Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough, 2017
Explorer, Northern Print, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017
Selected Group Exhibitions
Pair, Zembla Gallery, Howick, 2024
Measure, Middlesbrough Art Week, Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, 2023
Swimming Through a Diamond, Artshed Glaisdale, 2023
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Painting In The North East Now, NCA, Newcastle, 2022
From Gesture to Geometry, Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough, 2022
Enter Art Fair (Platform A), Lokomotivværkstedet, Copenhagen, 2022
Bis Repetita Placent, Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans Sartoux, 2019
A Foreign Encounter, Galerie Foe, Munich, 2015
:Xenotopia, Gibberd Gallery, Harlow, 2015
Chance Finds Us, mima, Middlesbrough, 2014
Tip of the Iceberg, Contemporary Art Society, London, 2013
Walk On, NGCA, Sunderland, touring to various UK galleries, 2013
National Print Biennale, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2007
Selected Commissions
Tees Colour Register, Navigator North, Middlesbrough Train Station, 2024, (Commissioned by Navigator North Most Creative Station)
Colour Register, The Lumen Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne, (Commissioned by Northern Print, Newcastle upon Tyne), 2020
UK Elevation, Hilton Wembley, London, 2012
Various Private commissions, 2007 - 2025
Grants and Awards
She was awarded an Arts Council Project Grant, 2017
She was a Prize Winner in the Nationwide Mercury Art Competition, Hospital Gallery,
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