Clare Smith: archives

This collection is uncatalogued. The following is an interim description which may be altered when detailed cataloguing takes place in future.

Digital material relating to Clare Smith's artistic process and the creation of Chemo Day drawings, including photographs of drawings, correspondence, audio for Sheffield Exhibition, material relating to book, and related records.

2019-2020s

46 files

Clare Smith was born in Penang, Malaysia. She was an artist, working from a studio in Dover and with a BA from the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) and MA from the University of the Arts London (UAL, Central Saint Martins). She co-founded Dover Arts Development (DAD), together with Joanna Jones. Clare Smith was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010 and was then diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2018. While in remission for bowel cancer, it became clear that she also had late-stage breast cancer. Clare Smith said that making drawings while undergoing treatment was an important way to cope with being ill and to pass the long periods of time undergoing chemo treatment.

Clare Smith sadly passed away in the Pilgrim’s Hospice, Canterbury on the evening of Saturday December 10th 2022, after a long illness.

Clare Smith's work featured on Wellcome Collection Stories, in an article titled "Chemotherapy Day-Drawings": words and artwork by Clare Smith (May 2022).

Clare Smith, Artist’s statement October 2022:

Drawing is a way of slowing down time I become fully absorbed in the process, often not feeling present in the world but present on the paper.

Clare works from a studio in Dover. She has a BA in Fine Art from UCA (University for the Creative Arts) and an MA in Fine Art from UAL (Central Saint Martins) and has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Her mixed English/Chinese heritage informs her perspective on issues of identity and categorisation and choice of materials. Smith works across genres in drawing, print media, collage and moving image. Her recent work reflects an interest in memory, the marking of time and more recently narrative and the remaking of stories. There is a delicacy and fragility to Smith’s work, which reflects a constant sense of the precariousness of physical existence and a concern with healing.

“You are turning life’s experiences into art” (Mike Tonkin, architect, Tonkin Liu architecture)

“All my work has an autobiographical connection and comes out of personal experience, everything I have absorbed emotionally and physically. Inspiration is drawn from Chinese and Japanese ceramics, Indonesian and Malaysian batiks; places I’ve lived in, visited or remembered.”

Her abstract drawings have been seen in the context of early abstraction prompted by the availability of microscopy, and the possibility of seeing another world, just as real, but ordinarily hidden by virtue of its scale as well as Theosophy and Anthroposophy (Simon Bill, artist and writer) and for Jacqui Mcintosh “There are parallels to be drawn with the automatic and channelled drawings of spiritualist artists such as Georgiana Houghton and Madge Gill as well as the ‘pure psychic automatism’ of surrealism. ” Paraphrased from André Breton’s definition of Surrealism as ‘Psychic automatism in its pure state,’ 1924. Breton, André, Manifestoes of Surrealism, United States: University of Michigan Press, 1969, p.26

Drawing is a way of slowing down time I become fully absorbed in the process, often not feeling present in the world but present on the paper.

All rights reserved. Copyright Clare Smith.

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.

None expected.

Digital archive files acquired alongside purchased artworks. Artworks include 43 works from the Chemo-Day Drawings series by Clare Smith and 7 drawings in an old Chinese book.