In June 2025, we invited Clare Woods to the Roberts Institute of Art Residency in Scotland.
Clare Woods
June 2025
Clare Woods is a UK-based artist whose practice spans painting, collage and printmaking. Informed by her early training as a sculptor, Woods’ work explores physical form in two-dimensional space. Across her practice, Woods challenges and works within traditional artistic genres such as landscape, portraiture and still life, engaging with themes of beauty, mortality and loss.
Often blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration through fluid brushwork and bold colours, her paintings on gessoed aluminium panels reinterpret personal and found photographs. Woods often crops and repositions these sources to create images that feel both familiar and uncanny.
While in residence, Clare embraced the opportunity for uninterrupted time spent on focused observation and exploration. Arriving without preconceived plans, she quickly found a daily rhythm of walking, photographing and painting.
This place is very special — the landscape, the studio, the environment and the quietness. There are no expectations from me. And that's incredibly freeing.
— Clare Woods
The surrounding landscape and grounds, particularly the walled garden and lake at Cortachy Castle, became points of inspiration which Clare closely observed, capturing the shifting colours and form through photography at different times of day.
Clare also made use of the residency studio, with its windows facing the river South Esk, to work on a smaller scale than usual.
Small-scale painting afforded her a sense of greater immediacy and spontaneity, enabling quicker experimentation and more direct engagement with the subjects of her paintings. She particularly focused on specific features of the residency estate: the vibrant plant litter of rhododendron blooms, productive areas of the walled garden filled with growing vegetables and historical garden structures.
The residency allowed Clare to finish a new body of smaller scale work, while gathering a rich body of photographic material that will continue feeding into her future work. Having found the residency studio environment transformative for her practice, she plans to maintain an emphasis on smaller scale paintings while integrating elements from her residency experience into larger pieces.