ARTIST STATEMENT, OCTOBER 2025
Since 2008 my practice has involved creating large-scale paintings through live performances in both public and private settings, often in collaboration with artists from other disciplines in the improvising community.
As I explore the evolving nature of painting in the context of the digital and post-human era, I reflect upon our connection with our bodies, other forms of intelligence and life - particularly in our muscle memory, and other sub-conscious sites. I think about the vibrancy of materials and how we interpret and make sense of what we perceive and observe. I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of predetermination, coding and glitches and how they relate to the creative process.
As a performance painter, my works are rooted in research into the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing. I explore how modalities can be translated as I examine connections between gesture and thought, spontaneity and risk and the tensions between failure, the unfinished and resolution. I’m interested in what gestures and mark-making can capture and reveal about the mind / body connection.
I draw from a range of disciplines, including the Meisner acting technique (which sharpens impulsive, instinctive responses), Contact Improvisation (attuning to balance, gravity and relational movement) and Jungian Active Imagination (a method for engaging the unconscious through symbols and gesture) to incorporate responses that are instinctive, impulsive, choreographed and intentional and to tune me in to my own somatic experience of painting. I reflect upon Internal landscapes, in relation to the external world and the stories related to the places, histories, and the body I inhabit. My interest in the history of gesture in painting includes research into overlooked female artists such as Marietta Tintoretto and others whose legacies offer vital, embodied lineages.
Through abstraction and figuration, I navigate processes that draw from memory, dreams, imagination, impulse, intuition and trace. My performances and processes are often transformative as I explore whether we can escape the confines of our prescribed patterns - whether neurological, physical or habitual.
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Claire Zakiewicz in Sara Lane Studios, Hoxton
Photographer: Chris Freeman, 2022
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Claire Zakiewicz, Sara Lane Studio, Hoxton, 2021
Photo: Chris Freeman
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CV Highlights
MA (Painting) - Royal College of Art, 2025 - 2026
MA (Fine Art Performance) from London Met, 2010
BA in (Fine Art Printmaking) from ARU Cambridge, 2020
Foundation (Art & Design), Chelsea College of Art, London, 1997
2025
Live Mellifera Performances, Sara Lane Studios, Hoxton
Blue Gallery, New York (April 8 - 27)
Solo show at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, Suffolk, UK (August 7 - 9)
MA (painting) Royal College of Art, London September 2025 - August 2026
)- supported by the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award
2024
Creatrix Pod with Habib William Kherbek
Live Mellifera Performances, Sara Lane Studios, Hoxton
Residency at Cyprus College of Art
2023 
Solo show Boudicca's Daughters at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, UK
2022
Staged solo immersive performance painting at Venice Biennale, "Tintoretto's Daughter"; reviewed by SPAM zine in Kherbek's essay 'Posthuman, all too human'.
Sonic works broadcast on Isotopica for Resonance FM
2021
Group show with Birgitta Hosea & Carali McCall (co-authors of Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945) for Some Loose Assemblies, 100 Years Gallery, London
Duo project with Gerald Curtis for Writing the Future, Watermans Art Centre London, (ACE funded)
Duo exhibition with Sophie Seita "There's no way I can know it, the object or the body", HOXTON 253 Art Project Space, London, (funded by Hackney Council)
2020
Published "The Aesthetics of Failure" as part of the volume "The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished" (Bloomsbury)
2013 - 2020
Lived, worked, performed and exhibited in New York on an O1 Visa; was named in the New York's top 10 artists list in Art511 magazine, 2018
2011
Animation and sonic works presented at Tate Tanks, for the exhibition Tweet me up and projections screened at Tate Britain, in the exhibition Label curated by Tracey Moberly
BIOGRAPHY
Claire Zakiewicz is an artist working in London.
In September 2025 she will begin an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art supported by the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award. Her practice examines the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and painting. She explores how this research can be applied within the context of contemporary painting and performance.
Born in London, UK, Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art and Anglia Ruskin University and received an MA from Sir John Cass School of Art while exhibiting and performing widely in London and Bergen throughout the 2000s. Between 2009 and 2012 Zakiewicz was a member of the ensemble Fig. with composer Alwynne Pritchard and sound artist Thorolf Thuestad, and performed in London, Bergen and New York. Her works were presented at Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, in the exhibitions Tweet Me Up, 2011 and Label, 2012 curated by Tracey Moberly.
Between 2013 and 2020, Zakiewicz was based in New York. Named in the New York's top ten artists list for Art511 magazine, 2018, she undertook numerous art residencies, including Mothership NYC, PointB Worklodge and Bill Young's Dance Studio, Soho. During her time in the USA Zakiewicz exhibited and performed at venues including The Elizabeth Foundation, NOoSPHERE Arts, Last Frontier NYC, Plaxall Gallery, Itinerant Performing Arts Festival and Satellite Art Show (Miami). Zakiewicz co-founded Creatrix Magazine with Jana Astanov in 2019, which she writes for regularly and produced Creatrix Pod, which was a weekly podcast of interviews with female artists, writers and critics with Habib William Kherbek.
Her essay 'The Aesthetics of Failure' was published by Bloomsbury in 'The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts; Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished', 2020.
Since 2020 Zakiewicz has reoriented back to the art scene in Europe and has had residencies at Cill Rialaig, Ireland, The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, Suffolk, England and Cyprus school of Art. Now living and working in London, Zakiewicz exhibited with artist/poet Sophie Seita in the duo show 'There's no way I can know it, the object or the body' at Hoxton 253 Arts Project Space in 2021. She has been collaborating with many London-based artists including co-authors of the publication Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, Simon Tyszko of Resonance FM, musicians Peter Nagle and Emily Suzanne Shapiro of 'Mellifera' Arts Platform. She performed and exhibited as part of 'Field of Action' curated by Ram Samocha in 2022. At the end of 2022 Claire staged a solo immersive performance painting during the closing month of the Venice Biennale 2022 titled Tintoretto's Daughter, a collaboration with the Venice-based photographer Mark Edward Smith on a project exploring the possibilities of performance painting documentation, which was reviewed by William Kherbek for SPAM zine. |
