Knowing

Clare Thackway, a representational painter of inner lives, often like a filmmaker to familiar images and symbols, reworking them in each exhibition. Among the dense thicket of recurring motifs are fragments of Christian iconography, archetypes from Jungian psychology, and the body, surging like a landscape, with working, feeling hands intertwined. As ever, textiles conceal and reveal forms of nakedness, falling in suggestive folds and openings, often on diaphanous silks. The persecuted Saint Sebastian, who was historically painted to Greek ideals of youth and beauty, is feminised. In traditional tellings, he was the martyr who couldn’t be killed by arrows in the third century AD and is now remembered as the patron of those who desire a saintly death. Rather than a declaration of personal devotion, Clare borrows from the West’s inherited canon of images to question received wisdom and point to the freedom that might lie beyond their burden. Here, they flash by like secrets with a storytelling logic.

To these classical subjects of painting, Clare now adds antique brass objects: a soap dispenser, a gilded door knocker, and a keyhole allude to Holy cleanliness, nonadmission and permission. Clare repeatedly returns to crumpled stripes—ubiquitous as a clean and modern design in homewares and fashion were once deemed diabolical and disordered, linked with medieval jokers, prisoners, sex workers and even the devil himself. Here, they pulsate optically and energetically, bouncing off this history and speaking to the clash of collective history and inner knowledge. In all the scenes, flowing fabrics and beautiful coverings, there is more than appears on the surface. 

The paintings resemble stills from a movie in which intimate spaces are a stage set for the abandonment of perfection and personal transformation. As psychological works, they play in a minor key, with the entire story carefully withheld. Stolen moments are soft with a sting; milk and venom mix freely. A biblical snake recurs, reclaimed. The golden snake, an image of terror, shame and forbidden knowledge, can also be a symbol of renewal and transformation by shedding. As the original female story of discovery and banishment, the snake has outlasted its Christian origin, but retains its cultural influence today: paradise can be ruined should a woman reach for too much. There’s a less known reference: that of the bronze serpent raised by Moses in the desert, which heals those who look upon it. In this exhibition, the golden snake appears anew, on a bed and on a woman’s body. It’s as though the narrative arc bends away from an ancient religious tradition toward a new kind of liberation, agency and knowing. Perhaps Eve is stepping out of paradise.