Exhibition of ceramics, installation, projection and video by Clare Carter, practice-based postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds.

This exhibition charts the first year of Clare Carter’s practice-based PhD project ‘Mothering Beyond the Flesh’ which investigates the relationships between landscape, maternal agency and creative practice.

Situated in the post-industrial and semi-rural landscape of West Yorkshire – where the artist was born, raised and currently lives with her two young children – the first year of this research has focussed on uncovering the historical and theoretical roots of her own separation from this landscape.

It addresses how maternal and creative practice can generate narratives that might illuminate ways in which to attend and re-attach ourselves to the immediate environment.

In addition to the video ‘Our Wider Flesh’, the exhibition presents a series of ceramic works made with materials foraged from the mines and fields close to the artist’s home, responding to the flesh of the land through intimate and performative vessels and tiles. Other works-in-progress include installation with projections, alternative photographic processes and auto-ethnographic writing.

Engaging with maternal, phenomenological, ecofeminist and landscape theory, the works on display are meditations on placemaking, geological deep-time intimacy and the cyclical nature of dwelling and caregiving – becoming research artefacts that trace the convergence of these different practices.

About the artist

Clare Carter is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher with a history of songwriting, music composition and performance. Her practice is auto-ethnographic and engages with site-specific projects that explore the human attachment to landscape and notions of world-making.

Carter finished her MA Fine Art in September 2022 at the University of Leeds. She was awarded a White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH) doctoral training scholarship for her PhD research project in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies.

Find out more about the exhibition.