Clara Nulty

My practice blends drawing, painting, printmaking, writing, collage, installation, and sculpture to explore the residue of human experience. My work is an archive, capturing moments that signify human presence and absence emotionally, environmentally, and personally. My subjects are the footprints we leave behind: plastic wrappers, street lamps, doorways, crumpled paper, heirlooms, pills, and hairpins. Substrates are also fertile ground for content. In addition to paper, I use absorbent ground to embed my images on wood, fabric, cardboard, plastic, and walls. Treating everyday subjects with reverence and attention; the careful selection of substrate elevates the conceptual heft of my paintings. Through languages of relics, scientific illustration, and negative space, I explore ephemera and contemplate mortality. 

I consider my surfaces in connection with the history of palimpsests. At a time when writing surfaces were precious, tablets and parchments were reused by scraping off the old to make room for the new. The resulting manuscript still bore traces of the previous notations. Palimpsests are a fantastic metaphor for the human condition. We are an ever growing amalgam of experience, stories, and scars. I layer personal narrative, symbolism, collage, and the transparency of watercolor and gouache to manufacture my own palimpsests. As seen in my Interior/Exterior paintings, the collaged surfaces, while sealed beneath a carefully rendered subject, still disclose at least the allusion to personal information. Similarly in the Interior/Exterior series, my envelope drawings are used surfaces on which I render small, private, everyday objects on top of public-facing vehicles of private information. The envelopes are a palimpsest of function, privacy, and personal history.

My background in observational painting and drawing radiated into an expanded field and I now balance traditional technique with experimentation. Watercolor seemingly lives in a space between painting and drawing. In early studio years, when asked how I artistically identify, I found that my medium was too associated with paint to be a drawing practice and too linked with drawing to be a painting practice. I realized I enjoy slipping between those two genres which freed me to further launch into collage, installation, and sculpture. In these formats, I now make use of many methods and materials including pencil, charcoal, pen, ink wash, pochoir, acrylic, gouache, and, still, watercolor. My process is an ecosystem, finding balance and unexpected relationships between materials and narratives. While my work performs reticence and withdrawal, my practice relies on flexibility to pivot and experiment between materials. My catalog of subjects is personally tied to my experience, yet the ambiguity of my images creates a universality in which the viewer can find themselves inside the world I create. I paint to create a catalog of the fingerprints we leave behind.

For sale inquiries, email: clara.mv.nulty@gmail.com