Clara Joyce
AfterImage
13 November - 19 December 2026
Opening 5-7pm Friday 13 November
Clara Joyce employs techniques of stain painting and layering to generate luminous material accumulations. Joyce treats the canvas as a membrane: an absorbent and porous boundary through which colour, light and matter flow. Pigment gathers and disperses in aerodynamic currents, folding into itself in pools that evoke sensations of movement and shifting light. Her paintings channel subconscious states, creating vaporous visual fields and speculative blueprints of inner worlds. Moving between the seen and felt, Joyce’s work explores the aesthetic unconscious as a magnetic field of attraction and repulsion.
The title draws from the optical phenomenon of the afterimage: the impression that remains on the retina after a light source or image has disappeared. Joyce is drawn to the instability of this image, and to the gap between what exists, what is seen and what is processed by the mind. Her paintings inhabit this space of uncertainty, where perception slips between the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible.
Pure Reciprocity, 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas, framed in aluminium, 86 x 216 cm
Elipsoid I, 2026, alcohol ink and resin, 17 x 35 x 21 cm
“I’m always trying to feel the things we cannot see, it seems very important to me. Within my painting, I am trying to envision and to bring into the material world something that exists outside of it. Which is of course a paradox, attempting to see the invisible, but paradoxes keep things going – they are like little engines in a person’s life or an artist’s practice.”
