In the studio with… Daniel & Clara
April 2024
In the Studio with… Daniel & Clara
Since meeting in 2010 Daniel & Clara have dedicated themselves to a shared life of creative experimentation, working across moving image, photography, performance and mail art to explore the nature of human experience, perception and reality.
The camera is their primary tool, working with both digital and analogue, still and moving images, to investigate the role the photographic image plays in how we create meaning and make sense of the world around us.
Their current projects focus on the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, particularly exploring the climate crisis as a psychological crisis and how the images we create of nature inform our understanding of what nature is and in turn what the human is.
What is the one thing you look forward to in the art world in 2024?
We started this year with the opening of two exhibitions: The Watcher and the Bird at Art Exchange and The Lost Estate at Norwich Castle, so we'll be having a few talks and screenings to accompany those that we are really looking forward to. They explore ideas around the complex relationship between humans and nature, through moving image, mail art and photographs. We always really enjoy the events surrounding shows, it's an opportunity to meet people and expand the conversation around the work.
We also have a book coming out soon about our Birding project – a body of work we've made over the last year about the human gaze, particularly focusing on birdwatching and the optical and psychological processes at play when humans look at birds.
Daniel & Clara, The Lost Estate, installation view at Norwich Castle, 2024
Who or what inspires you?
Being alive, the strangeness and beauty of being a living breathing creature with all our fears, dreams, desires and imaginings – life is so complex and fascinating! Art for us is an exploration of being human.
When we make art we are a part of a story that has been going on since the dawn of time, we are links in a chain of an ever-unfolding narrative of humans making sense of the world around us through pictures – this idea fuels us, we wake up each morning filled with excitement to get to work and participate in this story.
We are living in an exciting time where a lot of previously accepted assumptions about society, nature and the world are being questioned – cracks are opening up in reality, and through these, new possibilities can emerge – it's such an interesting time to be alive and to be an artist.
What would you like people to know about your art?
The world is moving very fast, we are bombarded with so much information each day through social media, advertising and TV and this can be overwhelming, so many of the images we encounter are trying to sell us something, to influence us in some way – our work doesn't have that agenda, it's not message art, we don't want to tell people what to think or feel but to create a space for people to encounter images that provoke thought and self-reflection, hopefully they activate questions but ones in which each viewer can go on their own journey and reflect on the complexity of their own experience, thoughts and feelings.
We know sometimes that with contemporary art the first step into the work can feel daunting so we'd like to encourage collectors to reach out and know that you can ask for studio visits and just ask us anything, there are no silly questions! Artists, collectors, curators and those interested in art all share a passion for similar things – we are all curious and excited by creativity and new ideas – we love meeting people, talking about art, sharing our creative process, so don't be shy.
Daniel & Clara, From Here To The End, polaroid diptych series, 2020-ongoing.
If you could choose to have an artwork what would it be and why?
We love this question, we spend every waking moment thinking about art so it's impossible to choose just one, so here's three that we've been thinking about recently.
There's a fantastic Peter Doig painting called Echo Lake currently on display at the Tate Britain – a large nocturnal landscape with a figure standing staring towards us across a murky body of water. The painting is infused with damp atmosphere, a night-time tension of alarm – everything seems to be alive, organic, steaming and vital – the figure is screaming and so is the landscape – the shock of being alive!
We also love Francis Bacon's landscapes. He didn't paint many, most of his pictures are interiors but the few exteriors he did are incredible – figures collapsing into long grass, merging with their environment, sometimes seeming to mutate into an animal – they are eerie pictures loaded with life-force in the way only Bacon can express.
David Hockney's joiner photographs, those pieces he made in the 1980s by taking hundreds of photographs of a subject from different positions and then placing them together to create a mosaic of time and space – these haven't been given the recognition they deserve, they are really ground-breaking and open up questions about what a photograph is in a way that still needs further exploration – very inspiring!
One thing all these have in common are questions about the space between painting and photography. Bacon and Doig both worked from photos and film stills, Hockney continuously questions the relationship between the two in his work. Our interest here is clear, we work primarily with the camera but with a painter's soul.
Which book is on your bedside table?
We read a lot, and re-read a lot too, a couple of books we've recently returned to are David Hockney's book On Photography and also the series of conversation books he made with Martin Gayford (we highly recommend A History of Pictures).
Virginia Woolf is one of our constant companions, her book To The Lighthouse has been really important to us over the last year, particularly when we made The Lost Estate, which is a photographic series exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world through imagined narratives taking place in the gardens of a country estate – each picture takes its title from a line in To The Lighthouse.
Can you give us a glimpse of what is next for you?
We've just got a new studio after several years without one so we are planning to spend lots of time experimenting with new work that we haven't been able to do previously, such as some larger photo pieces, we've been experimenting with hand-painting photographs so we'll be continuing that too.
We also have an ongoing mail art project that anyone can sign up to receive: https://www.patreon.com/danielandclara Throughout this year we are sending out the Avebury Letters, a series that grows from our encounters with Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire, one of our favourite places. Each letter is accompanied by a unique hand-painted photograph of an Avebury stone and recounts a story as told to us by the stones of what they have observed of our species through 5000 years.
Find out more about our work here: https://danielandclara.com
Daniel & Clara, Birds & Beasts of the British Countryside, c-type photographs hand-painted in acrylic, 2023.