Claire Burke

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A Sleep and a Forgetting

Reverberation

Meadow

 

 

Dreams and Bones:

Arlington Artist Asks What is Fleeting, What Endures

Claire Burke thinks art will be pulled in a new direction in the wake of the continuing economic crisis. Judging by her own exquisitely layered and textured new works, that direction is within.

Burke’s ruminative paintings are on display in a solo exhibition, We are Made of Dreams and Bones, opening August 31 at LynnArts’ Willow Community Gallery. As an artist and art therapist, she says the time is right to regain an emotional connection to art.

“So much of contemporary art has been corrupted by arrogance and money,” says Burke. “You can see it in all the art that’s obsessed with advertising. You can see it in the cult of physical perfection. Society worshipped the entrepreneur and the art world followed along.”

In her own deceptively simple compositions, Burke seeks out something different. “Art therapy teaches an artist a sense of humility,” she says. “In art therapy, art is the means to healing.  It’s the experience of communion that reconnects the patient with the human world. When you sit beside a traumatized child who gives birth to a piece of profound self-expression, you gain respect for the creative force that lies within us.”

Burke’s art fuses geological and emotional landscapes. She depicts a raw world only recently exposed to the surface, as if in the aftermath of a convulsive event. It is a landscape of mourning and renewal, desolation and also delicate beauty. Rocks, mountains, and water appear electric with life. The division between the dead and the living loses its relevance.

The artist says she herself came face-to-face with the impact of loss after experiencing the death of one of her closest friends. The title of the show, We are Made of Dreams and Bones, comes from Pete Seeger’s Garden Song, which was performed at the funeral.

Since then, she says, she has sought in her art to explore the relationship between the animate and inanimate, the living, the dying and the dead.

“You re-think your place in the world,” she says. “You re-think what it is to be human and mortal and imperfect. One thing I love about art is that it has the power to strip us of our protective layers. What remains are the dreams and bones.”

We are Made of Dreams and Bones will be on exhibit at the Willow Community Gallery, LynnArts, 25 Exchange Street, in Central Square, Lynn from August 31 through October 9, 2009. A reception for the artist will be held on September 12, from 2 to 4 p.m. Gallery hours are Mon, Tues, Wed, and Fri from 10 to 4, and Thu from 10 to 7. The gallery will be closed on Labor Day.

Artist and art therapist Claire Burke lives and works in Arlington, MA. Burke is a graduate of Boston College and Lesley University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. www.cburkeart.com

LynnArts is a private nonprofit dedicated to enriching the lives of Lynn residents and the Greater North Shore community by offering cultural and educational programming that fosters an appreciation of, and access to, the visual and performing arts. For more information please contact Susan Halter at swhalter@lynnarts.org, call 781-598-5244, or visit www.lynnarts.org.