Claire Hooper

Hooper’s recent watercolour works disturb the presumed legibility of imagery by evoking the multifaceted symbolism of the Greek goddess, Hekate. This sleight of hand sees ribbons as fluctuating pathways and Y-junctions, while larger scale watercolours appear as jigsaws of sliced geodes and cut aggregates of dense rock formations. In both instances, Hooper has constructed the patterns and compositions by repeating profile silhouettes of her daughter, grandmother, adopted sister and herself. Once noticed, these facial profiles behave as discrete patterning devices and as detectable code. Hooper references the polymath, philosopher and intellectual Roger Caillois, whose La Lecture des Pierres, 1970, catalogued a materialist mysticism in the magical reading of stones. Caillois’ decipherment of images within naturally occurring forms is one of personal projection, overlaying a pattern, system and signification to natural phenomena. In Hooper’s use of the profile, the embedded image is both a personal means of apprehension and a configured optic.

Claire Hooper’s watercolour works on paper employ the medium through a process of layering and revealing, exploring tonal shifts arising from the transparency and interaction of pigments. In several works from 2020, such as Profundo Verde, Hooper employs the format of a diptych that can be assembled in two different arrangements. This system, in which the work can be turned around on itself, playfully explores the possibilities between choice and constraint. 

Clay as Bread and Dust as Wine, 2016, explores the Mesopotamian myth ‘The Descent of Innana to the Underworld’. The large-scale, site-specific installation brings to life an imagined temple to the goddess Ereshkigal, at Kutha in Northern Iraq. Though recognised by successive generations of Sumerian, Assyrian and Aramaic cultures to be the entrance to the underworld, this site has so far eluded archaeologists. Hooper’s installation alludes to columns, entryways and decorative wall panels, while never offering a complete image of the structure. They imagine the whole through fragments, while suggesting the emergence of new meaning and purpose through these very fragments.