"Territories" Niamh Clarke
Redcouch Gallery
1 May – 13 June 2026
Artist: Niamh Clarke (www.niamhclarke.info)
Territories is a contemporary drawing exhibition exploring memory, landscape, and the subtle pressures of environmental change. In a year shaped by questions of endurance and trace, Niamh Clarke’s work draws us towards what is submerged or half-seen, where meaning gathers slowly through attention, gesture, and material. The exhibition invites viewers to consider what is preserved, what is eroded, and what persists just beneath the surface.
Territories turns towards what is half-seen and slowly accumulated, the trace, the drift of memory, and the ways landscape can act as a repository for experience. Clarke’s work asks us to stay with what is submerged or eroded, and to notice how meaning gathers over time rather than arriving all at once.
Clarke’s practice is predominantly drawing, and includes written prose, watercolours and Super8 video. Her drawing practice reflects an interest in memory and temporality, and explores the relationship between photography and drawing, with a focus 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.
Clarke describes herself, via Baudelaire, as a “passionate spectator”, drawn to the friction between what is visible and what remains hidden. Images intersect, memories layer and bleed, and the work gathers references through reading and encountering affinities that only gradually disclose their meaning. Through an embodied drawing practice, she aims to interrogate authorship and autobiographical links, and the blurring of edges between the two. The images and references in this exhibition, while disparate in nature, are like thought streams, tied together by little synchronicities, personal experience and the human condition.
Installation is treated as part of the reading, with works positioned to convey intention or direction across the space, allowing viewers to experience the exhibition as fragments within an overall narrative. Territories is a reiteration and continuation of Clarke’s solo exhibition Interiorities (Custom House Studios, Westport, September 2025), brought into a new context and sequence at CHG&S.
Artist biography
Niamh Clarke is an artist based in Belfast and a studio holder at Queen Street Studios (QSS). She is a co-founder and member of the collaborative drawing group The Drawing Journal, and graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art (First Class) from Ulster University in 2019. Recent exhibitions include lucent (touring to Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Highlanes Gallery Drogheda, Wexford Arts Centre, and The Arts Institute, Plymouth), Anonymous Drawings (Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin), and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize touring exhibition (2022). She has exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy (191st Annual Exhibition) and the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition at the Ulster Museum, and her awards include the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize shortlist (2022) and the RDS Visual Art Awards shortlist (2019).
