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Custom House Studios + Gallery cordially invites you to the official opening reception for 'Interiorities' a solo exhibition by artist Niamh Clarke on Thursday 18th September at 6pm. Exhibition continues until Sunday 12th October.‘We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. “Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there’s that broken spur again, that fall…and so on indefinitely” ‘
Breton (1928)
Calle lives in the shadow, existing in the trace of another, yet she exposes her interior musings and weaknesses more so than any of the subjects she aims to possess. Breton’s Nadja becomes a mirror that frees him to truly question and understand himself. Woolf’s lamentations reveal the turbulence just below the surface, yet always capture the most beautiful, tender, intimate observations.
In Woodman’s enigmatic, symbolic and orchestrated self-portraits, while seemingly a reflection of some kind of inner turmoil, reveal the questioning, curiosity, and intention of an overflowing creative mind.
Maybe impressionable, but definitely leaving an impression, I not only feel an affinity with these artists and others whose influences are present in this exhibition, but closer than that, it’s as if written or visualised through my thoughts, my ponderings, my obsessions.
Images intersect, memories layer and bleed. Things that belong to another are now in my possession.
Echoes, traces, mirrors, reflections….. shared interiorities.
In this exhibition and through my embodied drawing practice I aim to interrogate authorship and autobiographical links and the blurring of edges between the two. The images and references in this exhibition while disparate in their nature, are like thought streams, from one story or creative mind to another; tied together by little synchronicities, personal experience and the human condition.
Niamh Clarke is a BA (Hons) Fine Art graduate from Ulster University 2019 and is based at QSS studios Belfast. She is a co-founder and member of the collaborative drawing group The Drawing Journal. Recent group exhibitions include: In Living Memory, Household, Belfast (2025), ‘lucent’ a touring group exhibition, which travelled to Uillin, West Cork (2023), Highlanes, Drogheda (2024) Wexford Arts Centre (2024) and The Levinsky gallery Plymouth (2025), and ‘Ode to Light’ Arcade Gallery Belfast (2023). Solo exhibitions include: ‘the transient and the perishing’ Platform Gallery, Belfast (2021).
Clarke’s drawing practice reflects an interest in memory and temporality. Exploring the relationship between photography and drawing, a focus is placed on the embodied presence of gesture and materialisation through re-description of found and personal photographs. Containing personal narratives and references that draw inspiration from archival materials, the drawings embrace subconsciousness and stream of consciousness, embodied practice and materiality. Images are selected intuitively to create an implied narrative.
Image: After Nadja (2025), Graphite and White Marker on Paper
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Quay, Westport, Ireland
