Clare’s practice is deeply rooted in their surroundings, shaped by the quiet rhythms of suburban Sydney and the chaotic energy of the city streets they later called home. In this conversation, they reflect on how childhood daydreams and found objects became a foundation for their work, the influence of music and outsider culture, and the messy, restless energy of their studio.

Where did you grow up Clare and has this helped shape your practice?

I grew up in Sydney in a more suburban area, just outside the city heading west. The suburb I grew up in isn’t on the train line, and when I was young it felt much quieter than other places—lots of old people and a few young families. Because of the type of area it was, I spent a lot of time walking and riding my bike around alone, in what felt like an aimless daydream. I think all of this has shaped my practice in the sense that it allowed me to become perceptive to my surroundings and to locate a curiosity and sense of wonder in the mundane and everyday.

A lot of my wandering around as a kid, in the window between school finishing and the sun going down, involved collecting things I could find on the street—especially during council cleanup: scrap metal, old tools and objects, newspapers and advertisements. I remember climbing a tree and finding, wedged in the fork of the trunk, a brochure containing explicit pictures of women, when I was probably about 7 or 8. All of this feels more and more relevant to the work that I make and the way that I see things.

Sydney in its entirety, as a city, is certainly unique. The city—particularly Darlinghurst, where I’ve spent most of my adulthood so far—has provided a lot by way of visual stimulus, and contemplation on the mania of contemporaneity, and systems and structures in societies and how we all live within them. Sydney’s history as a colony, and the newness and darkness of its history, is something that I am more and more aware of, as my practice has moved toward a focus on recorded history, erasure, and power. But I’m not sure I fully understand how the cultural identity of this country has affected me yet.

How do you and Samoh know each other, and what’s your favourite photo by him?

I can’t remember when I first met Samoh—just through our friendship circles. It feels like there is Samoh’s generation and then my generation, and at some point we all merged and began to inspire one another. Gab Lo Presti is another one of these mentor figures to me. I probably met Samoh because he was taking pictures of some of my friends when we were younger.

It is hard to pick a favourite Samoh picture because he hasn’t just taken so many photographs, but so many that are incredible. I love all of the pictures he takes of television and laptop screens—Judge Judy, game shows, current affairs. I love the photograph on page 116 of his book Fake Nostalgia—three people all asleep on their sides, two in the bed and one on the floor, taken from the doorway. And on page 142—a kid drinking a longneck (Samoh told me his name was Bo Reid) in Hungry Jack’s on Oxford Street, I think it was taken sometime between 2001 and 2005.

What’s your studio practice like?

At the moment it is more time-sensitive than it has been in the past. Because I’m working a full-time job now, I mostly go into my studio in the afternoons or evenings to stretch canvases, do some writing and planning—and then on Saturdays I paint. I kind of like this routine. For a long time, I tried to get away with working as little as possible to allow for more studio time, but it isn’t realistic anymore. I also found that when I was in the studio five days a week, I would go a little crazy, or sort of forget how to be part of the world.

Right now I’m making really big paintings again, which is a desire I try to curb but never can. My studio is up three flights of stairs and is on a busy street, so I leave the window open and listen to the cars rush by and the noisy people downstairs. When I’m making a work, things feel best if I’m a little manic—I never want to feel bored or too relaxed while making something. I do a lot of pacing around and try not to get distracted, which is a challenge of mine. I use a lot of brushes when I paint—just way too many. So there are brushes everywhere, jars and containers with mixtures, printed images and source material on the walls, table, and floor… wood and plywood sheets, sheets of aluminium, stretcher bars and rolls of canvas everywhere. There’s paint all over the floor—it’s so messy.

How did you go about working on this collection with Hoddle, and where did the imagery come from?

It felt like this was in the works for a while. During the period of time that I was working on this collection with Gab—emailing back and forth, drawing and painting things—I moved house three or four times, and I moved studios three times. So naturally during this timeline, I was feeling scattered, but like I was always pulling at lots of different little moments and changes. What was so great was how we were able to use a sort of archive of my work, as well as some things that I made specifically for the collection, and marry them into something distilled and simplified.

The things I made specifically for the collection were painted and drawn in a sort of deranged way—just pulling lots and lots of images from my archive and folders, and working quickly, with speed and spontaneity. It was fun. I did this big wall-sized painting of lots of different pictures all in black, straight onto a roll of paper that came from the backdrop of a photo studio. I was looking at newspaper headlines, emails, the news, conspiracy pictures, posters off the street.

What’s your favourite song at the moment, and of all time?

My favourite song of all time is Overkill by Men at Work.

My favourite songs at the moment I have three:

1 ~ Stay by The Blue Nile

2 ~ Tall Grass by Kath Bloom and Loren Connors

3 ~ In Spring by Ela Orleans

How has music and outsider culture influenced you and your work?

In every way. A huge part of growing up in a conservative environment was discovering how to break out of it—and those avenues were always to do with music, art, and politics. But particularly music, because, at least from the way I experience it, it is the most democratic, universal, liberating, communal, intangible form of expression.

When I was a teenager, I discovered Riot Grrrl music and the adjacent movement and visual languages, which were important to me at the time as a high schooler. I can trace a lot of my aesthetic tendencies back to those subcultural movements, specifically punk.

I think painting, aside from theoretical and conceptual notions, is an attempt to distill a feeling into something that you can see and experience. I think this is also what a song does.

View Clare Wigney recent work www.clarewigney.com

Images by Sam Stephenson www.sam-stephenson.com