Esmé Clutterbuck

Esmé trained in Fine Art at Portsmouth Polytechnic, the Royal Academy Schools and Central St/Martins and has a studio in Bristol. She works with drawing, photography and print. She has had work in numerous Open exhibitions: most recently the RA Summer Exhibition and this year’s RWA Photo Open.

Her drawings are made on a variety of surfaces, including digital images, magazine pages, walls, flannels and domestic linens.

These, her most recent drawings, are made with Bideford Black and other earth pigments sourced in North Devon. Initially they were planned as a series of 100 small drawings, “Working rapidly, in fairly quick succession, allowed me the freedom to follow an initial impulse wherever it went.”

The drawings are reminiscent of fabric designs or the celebration of rituals. There is joy in the purely optical. They also suggest the scientific: cell formations, planets, solar systems, the cycles of life and the female body, generation and growth. “I love the idea that our universe is essentially unstable: that substances are mutable, and that our bodies whilst new in human terms actually contain atoms that are billions of years old.”