"Territories" Niamh Clarke
Redcouch Gallery
1 May – 13 June 2026
Artist: Niamh Clarke (www.niamhclarke.info)
This exhibition presents moments of recognition, personification and shared human experiences. 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).
‘Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences’
Olga Tokarczuk
This exhibition presents moments of recognition, personification and shared human experiences. I fall in love with writers and artists each time I open a book or discover a work of art that seems to so perfectly articulate what is going on in my world at that precise moment. The shared affinity, serendipity, maybe a common consciousness.
Do you know that meme, ‘Can I never have an original thought?’ The answer is no, I can’t or haven’t. No matter what turmoil, curiosity, certain pertaining obsession is occurring within me, I can guarantee that I will open a book or come across a piece of art in that very moment that so perfectly embodies that particular preoccupation.
Reading the last chapter of Andre Breton’s ‘Nadja’, brought so many things to light, and into focus. Perhaps there is some insanity to the roaming curiosity, constant noticing, curated stalking? A hypervigilance or awareness to chance that artists share?
Whatever artists or writers produce isn’t it is still interior? In Anne Carsons artist book ‘Nox’ dissecting language to lament her brothers passing, she traverses this inner terrain through process, revealing, yet completely interior. Sophie Calle is a curiosity, creating art from her interior ponderings. She employs rules to direct the artwork, she follows to get outside of herself, but as the shadow she is as concrete as the fleeting action she is reflecting. A mirror to the passages she herself has taken or has imagined.
My drawing practice is interior, I come across an image that I love without reason, or choice. I keep it in the periphery until by some chance I chose to draw it, maybe bored of trees and a framed frozen body catches my attention, who knows. And as I am drawing it, the body labours and the mind drifts, a memory escapes, a phrase I recognise, and this connects to something you are ruminating on, and then a poem unlocks another puzzle piece. But still, I reject reason, until soon there can be no amputation of meaning. A drawing is realised in the shape of my human moments, or accumulations of moments.
I see myself as the flaneur who traverses the interior territories of others, always a spectator, a shadowing other. I experience what has flowed through others, but now my drawings exist as evidence, a tender act. But I can only experience what I myself already know, each artwork is always a self-portrait, a glaring admission, a revelation.
‘Territories’ is a touring exhibition and is a reiteration and continuation of work shown in ‘Interiorities’ at Custom House Studios, Westport in September 2025.
