Claire Zakiewicz

“For as long as I can remember, I have spent most of my time drawing, painting and making things. At school, I was the artist. It wasn’t like I had a choice. Everybody told me I was an artist,” remembers Claire Zakiewicz, who spent her childhood creating elaborate board games, painting, drawing, making clothes, music and jewelry with friends and kin. Nowadays, Zakiewicz is a Multi-media Artist and DJ. Her main focus is Art, drawing in particular. Post-college brought a bit of a low emotionally, a time when it felt impossible to “make money without compromising my creativity – selling out, as I saw it.” Having been warned by faculty to go into illustration or fashion design, she stubbornly clung to Fine Art. “For many years, I worked extremely hard developing my ability to be resourceful, so that I could gradually reduce the number of hours I worked for money,” says Claire about taking on work as a teacher, gallery assistant, website designer, saxophonist and DJ, while still being a painter that both exhibited and sold paintings. During her Masters, she became more experimental with her work, performing with composers, improvisers, dancers and theatre artists. Likewise, painting, performance, improvised and composed sonic works, animation and writing are important components of her current practice. “My work is about the processes and materials of drawing itself – it’s about perception, observation, focus, movement, theories of time, space and energy.” Currently, the artist is looking at improvisation and composition as well as the relationships between sound and drawing. Working both solo and collaborative at times, her inter-disciplinary ensemble made up of dancers, musicians, poets and visual artists is called Assembly. Working out of her studio in London, the artist also keeps a storage unit in New York and is there often. In the coming months, she has a studio at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, which provides both studio space and a forum for the development of artistic practices. “When traveling, my sketchbook becomes my studio,” confides Claire. One of her greatest artistic challenges is knowing when a work is finished. “Resolution is part of an artistic process. My biggest challenge is working with the tension between struggle and resolution.” Right now, she’s working on multiple projects, including collaborations with various musicians, physicists, and actors to continue research into the relationships between sound, movement and drawing as integrated modalities. Her forthcoming written essay The Aesthetics of Imperfection, edited by Andy Hamilton, will be published this March by Bloomsbury. Another writing project in collaboration with poet Dannie-Lu Carr, for a book called Open, explores the dialogue between word and drawing and will be presented as a series of spoken word and live drawing performances in New York, Venice and London at the time of publication. Artwork wise, she’s in the midst of a new series about the tension between failure and perfection, which will be exhibited at Arti511 in Venice during the opening of the Biennale. The Aesthetics of Failure opens in May at Arti3160, Venice during the opening weeks of the Venice Biennale. The full exhibition will include performances by Assembly, featuring musicians Gavin Starks, Lenna Pierce, poet Dannie-Lu Carr and dancers Mariana Alvierez, Pierre Guilbault, and Anna Chirescu.