Claire Elliott: Painting the Unruly Beauty of Gardens, Uncovering Plant Blindness, and the Illusion of Control
Claire Elliott is a painter who lives and works in Portland, OR, where she is a member of Wave Contemporary. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2014. Her work is represented in public and private collections nationally. Recent exhibitions include Rituals at Wavelength Space, the WAVE collective shows En Motion and The Nexus of Here, and A Creeping Normality at 1122 Gallery.
Artist Statement
My work addresses concerns about the relationship between humans and landscape, how we define ‘nature’, and the idea of painting as a medium. My paintings focus on the physical structures and cultural origins of gardens, and the plants that are given permission to grow there. In landscaped spaces, there is an illusion of control; however, things can quickly go awry, either from the persistent encroachment of weeds or through the confusion of shifting cycles in foliage. This combination can lead to surprising, unsettling encounters in the garden—plants that feel unfamiliar or unidentifiable and leave the reason for their presence in the garden a mystery—are they foe or friend, a faded beauty or a spiky intruder?
Plant Blindness is a term for the human inability to notice plants in one's everyday life. In our daily interactions (or ignorance) of nature, we only see the part, not the whole cycle, and we selectively ignore plants. Certain plants are only identifiable to the typical observer when they are in their most iconic blooming phases, not the unshowy seedheads or tender sprouts. In these works, I look for the moments when familiar plants can appear alien, like quavering poppy pods, or surprising, as with the dark, seed-filled remains of last summer’s zinnias. A garden is built through control and exclusion; I examine the ways in which nature refuses to comply.
Website: www.claireelliott.com
Instagram: @claire.elliott.art
Interview
Your work explores the relationship between humans and landscape, particularly within gardens. What first drew you to this theme, and how has your perspective evolved over time?
I've always been drawn to gardens—the house I grew up in had previously been owned by avid amateur gardeners. It was a magical collection of rare specimens, paired with perfectly placed identification tags. It was not a garden planted with little children in mind; only the strongest plants survived our tenure, and my siblings and I had wonderful fun collecting and redistributing the many plant labels throughout the backyard. That garden was a foundational element of my relationship to landscape and the things that intrigued me about it—it introduced me to the idea of looking closely at plants, as well as a sense of wonder and mystery about what could be contained behind a garden fence.
Later, when I learned about the history of garden design in the context of André Le Nôtre and Versailles, I became fascinated by the imposition of perspective onto the natural space. For a long time, that was the main focus of my work. I was more zoomed out, considering the large-scale ways in which humans impose order in the form of grids, pathways, and crisp lawns onto a space that naturally wants to be soft-edged and wild.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I had two young children and a small backyard and spent a lot of time working in my garden. All of a sudden, my focus shifted to the smallest elements of a natural space: big formal lawns and topiaries were no longer the thing that caught my eye. I became interested in the weeds that grew up in between the sidewalk cracks. Taking this micro approach to the plants that surround us every day is how I came to my current body of work—I am always looking at the individual plants that make up the whole, wondering if they were intentionally placed, carefully nurtured, imported from afar, or if they have just sprung up where someone carelessly let a weed flourish, or more rarely, where they were always meant to be.
You discuss the illusion of control in landscaped spaces. How do you capture the tension between order and chaos in your paintings?
I try to capture that tension in the actual application of paint onto the surface: whether it's wild brushwork, drippy abstraction, or a burst of color in an otherwise sedate palette. I see the way in which I try to control the paint as being a parallel to the gardener's attempt to control plants.
When I garden, I always tell myself that at least a third of what I've planted in any given year will probably fail. It's frustrating but it's part of the mystery and the thrill of working with nature. I feel the same about what I paint: at least a third—almost certainly more—of what I do on the canvas isn't visible in the final painting. Things get wiped out, painted over, excised with the palette knife. But that work all leads to something—in the garden, tending to a sickly plant might teach me what to put in that space next year. On the canvas, the disappointing realization that my composition isn't going to work out will echo in the next few pieces I work on. I can try and make order out of the chaos, but it's much less disappointing and much more successful to work with it. In my paintings I try to show how nature can be unbridled and abundant but also scrawny and scraggly. It often doesn't do what I want and expect; the thing I can control is how I react to it.
The concept of Plant Blindness—the human tendency to overlook plants unless they are in bloom—is fascinating. How does this idea inform your work, and what do you hope viewers notice about the plants you depict?
The idea of plant blindness began to figure in my work through my own experiences of gardening and being out in the world. When I moved into my home, the garden was non-existent, a big mass of wood chips and a few pots. As we got to work figuring out how we would plant it out and what might grow well, I began really thoroughly inspecting the gardens around me. Portland is something of a garden paradise—the range of what you can grow here is really extraordinary. An English cottage garden can be on the same block as native xeriscaping, with houses featuring palm trees and rose bushes in between.
This means that on my walks through the neighborhood to get plant inspiration, the lineup of what is in bloom and what is just starting to sprout is constantly evolving and surprising me. People also take a relatively laissez-faire approach towards gardening here—a lot of things that would usually be cut back or cleared out in other gardens are left to go to seed and overwinter. It can be hard to want to prune your roses too soon because you never know when you might get an unexpected January bloom.
On the other hand, our wet weather can lead to strange clumpings of petals and blossoms, and black mold creating these odd, otherworldly plant structures. They have, from time to time, stopped me in my tracks and made me try to figure out what kind of plant I'm looking at—what moment in its growth cycle could produce such mysterious fruit?
My own revelatory moment with plant blindness came when I was in a garden in England where everything was beautifully in bloom. I turned a corner towards a more neglected area that had gone to seed and suddenly saw these 5-foot tall poppy pods waving in the breeze. Between the way the light was hitting them and my own ignorance of when poppies flower, I could not figure out what the strange alien orbs were at first. Once I realized, I was absolutely enchanted by them.
Focusing on the subject has certainly made me a better gardener, but I also like to think it's made me better connected to the natural world; it's very easy to take from plants without understanding them. It's better for us and the plants if everyone comprehends just a little bit how a strawberry flower turns into a ripe berry or how those unsightly husks poking out of your columbines in September are actually full of seeds that could populate a whole meadow next spring. My hope is that viewers will get a better sense of the natural world and of plant cycles and start to be able to recognize the extraordinary variety and ingenuity on display around us.
“Blackened Artichoke Heads”
Your paintings make the familiar feel alien, highlighting moments where nature defies expectations. Can you share an example of a particular work where this transformation is especially evident?
My painting, Blackened Artichoke Heads, comes from my own personal experience. Artichokes are one of those plants, like pineapples, that people are usually surprised to learn how they actually grow. I never expected there to be quite so much foliage or height, and their color can be really extraordinary in the summer; the leaves are a strong dusty teal, almost frosty. If you let them bloom instead of harvesting them to eat (which is what I do because I cannot keep the bugs out of there), their center opens up into ultraviolet blue stamens. It's the sort of color that you can't quite capture through a photo on your phone because it's vibrating on some otherworldly frequency.
These heads get so heavy that the stalks start to bend—often the artichoke heads are sort of nodding downwards just at face height. Before I lived in Portland, I had never seen an artichoke still standing in winter before. If they get cold and wet enough, artichoke plants turn into these spindly black stalks with arched swan necks, sometimes almost 5 ft tall. Passersby who didn't remember that there had been an artichoke growing there that summer could be forgiven for trying to figure out what on earth the strange creature sprouting out of the ground was in January.
And so, that's what I was trying to capture in that particular painting—the way that the artichoke starts to turn into a scarecrow, the way that it can startle you if it's tall enough, and the light is dim and you're not sure if those side stalks might reach out and grab your shoulder.
As a member of Wave Contemporary and an artist with work in public and private collections, how has being part of a collective influenced your practice and artistic growth?
Art can be such a lonely endeavor. While many artists enjoy collaborative work, for me painting works best in solitude, but that doesn't mean the entire pursuit should be lonely. Being part of a community opens up unexpected pathways and exposes everyone to new ideas. Most people lose access to real critique when they leave school. For myself, the periods following my graduate and undergraduate education made me feel adrift. It was hard to get real feedback and hard to know when to be able to give it.
One thing that has been so beautiful to me about being a member of Wave is that through our critiques we've all gotten to know each other's work intimately, which gives us a great ability to shape shows, projects, and collaborations tailored to our shared and individual bodies of work and interest.
