General News
7 February, 2025
Latest exhibition encourages reflection
A WARRNAMBOOL- BASED artist is encouraging residents to reflect on life’s precious moments and rising from hardship at this month’s exhibition at the Camperdown Courthouse.
Claire Chatfield is bringing over 30 years’ experience to the courthouse with a multimedia exhibition focusing on her Irish family origins and the passing nature of life.
Ms Chatfield said she was interested in tracing her family history on her mother’s side and uses old family photographs as a basis of some of her ceramic, sculptural, printmaking and drawn works.
“I wanted to understand more about my family, and therefore more about myself and my own journey,” she said.
“I have suffered a lot from anxiety and depression, and that’s in the works – there’s themes like burning out and a phoenix rising from the ashes.
“Going into all that darkness and coming out of that renewed in some way.
“Recycling is a huge part of what I do - I used gloves I found on the road in one of my artworks looking at our colonial past.”
Ms Chatfield also uses Buddhist ideology as inspiration incorporating quotes into her works to promote a spiritual reflection on life.
She said she hoped people took the time to enjoy the work.
“If they’re just coming as viewers, I just hope they spend the time with them and think about what some of these quotes mean to them, like ‘only grow thoughts your brain wouldn’t mind putting in a vase’ – that’s beautiful,” she said.
“I struggle with a lot of dark thoughts, and so it’s how I transform that.
“When somebody has put that time into doing works that explore our own psyche, to me it’s like in our chemical process because you’re taking a lot of these dark things but at the end you have something beautiful.
“That, for me, is what it’s about – is transforming negative energy into something people want, or are at least interested in.
“If I heal myself, then I’m passing that on to other people in some large or small way, depending on how people engage with it.”
Read More: Camperdown