2026.08 Clare Thackway Interview — Tabula Rasa Gallery

Wade
Solo exhibition of Clare Thackway
Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing
27 June – 29 August 2026
Opening: Saturday, 27 June 2026, 4 pm

Interview with Clare Thackway
Beijing, 25 June 2026

I = Interviewer
C-T = Clare Thackway

Water, Solutio, and Transformation

I
I'd like to start by asking about your connection to Carl Jung's concept of solutio, which you describe as a fundamental concept in your solo exhibition at Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing, this June. What first brought you to this concept?

C-T
There is a rich visual language in his ideas around symbols and interpretation. I will often start with a feeling and an intuitive visual symbol that represents it, in this case it was water, the void or abyss and I will check how Jung interpreted these. It sparks new associations. I don't see symbols as having fixed meanings, but it’s a helpful starting point.

I kept having a recurring dream of falling - crossing from one side to another and falling into an abyss or into a body of water. After reading Jung, I began to contextualize that dream through his ideas of descent and ascent: the notion that you have to go down before you can come back up. This was the basis for the painting, Then I Wake Up.

Water carries so many psychological and emotional associations. The concept of solutio, is borrowed from alchemy. It's the idea of water as a symbol of transformation: a solution that moves from ice to liquid to vapour, constantly changing state. Jung saw solutio as part of individuation, a psychological shift often associated with emotional upheaval and major life transitions, a deepening into maturity and truer sense of self. Before a new self can emerge, the old one often has to dissolve.

Then I Wake Up, Oil on linen, 160 × 120 cm, 2026

I
I keep forgetting how many forms water takes. Mist, for example - I don't always think of it as a form of water.

C-T
When I first started working on the exhibition, I imagined creating these mist-filled cave like spaces, but gradually the idea of water itself became much more important. Dark water. I'm actually quite afraid of the ocean, I'm scared of deep water. The idea that you can't see the bottom, or that you don't know what's beneath you...

I
There's a real sense of the abyss. I could never swim in the ocean, completely alone.

C-T
I think the abyss is an important image. Water can be comforting, cleansing, and beautiful, but there's also a real terror and vulnerability.

I remember camping with my cousins and my brother in Kakadu National Park, near Darwin, Australia. There was a huge pool of black water beneath a cliff. Just as we were about to swim, my cousin said, "Nobody knows how deep this is."

There were enormous cliffs, their shadow stretching across the water. The water was brown at first, but once it entered the shadow, it became completely black. There were crocodiles in the area, who knows what was in there. I swam as far as the shadow, but I became completely petrified. I turned around and swam back. I just couldn't make myself cross it.

I'm interested in the symbolism of different bodies of water. Oceans, lakes, and rivers all relate to the unconscious, to hidden knowledge and unseen ideas. Immersion in water suggests a return to dreams, emotions, fantasies, and other unknown aspects of the self.

I
I really like the way you categorize different types of water and connect them with different emotions.

C-T
Yes. Swamps can represent stagnation because the water doesn't flow. Mist suggests liminality, existing between two states or places. Floods carry their own symbolism of overwhelming emotion, dissolution, psychic upheaval. A bath: purification and healing.

I also find these ideas fascinating in a biblical context, particularly baptism, immersion in water represents a death of the old self and rebirth into new life, and also about creation. Before anything exists, God hovers over the waters. There's this sense of nothingness before creation, before change begins.

Even though I do not believe or identify with the faith anymore, the stories and symbols remain deeply embedded in my psyche. Does that make sense?

I
Yes. It's part of your consciousness because you grew up with it. those ideas have shaped you understanding of the world, they're still part of how you think. I think that's how everyone works. We take bits and pieces from different people, then form our own understanding.

C-T
Exactly. As an artist, it's really a way of collecting ideas and extending my own visual and emotional language.

Remembering the Australian Landscape

I
Your work refers to a rainforest, where was it exactly?

C-T
I used to live in the Illawarra, south of Sydney. This creak is near Stanwell Park. It's classified as eucalyptus forest with a shrubby under-story. It’s lush like a rainforest, where the escarpment meets the ocean.

When I was developing this body of work, I was searching for images and I contacted so many people who lived near water whether they had photographs of themselves or friends in streams, creeks, or rivers. Then a good friend sent me a photograph of her daughter standing in a creek, and I immediately thought, "That's exactly what I've been looking for." Maybe coincidentally, I was looking for my old home.

It was quite a strange process, living in central Paris while trying to imagine this Australian bush landscape. In the end, I asked a friend to visit the creek and photograph the rock faces, the water, and the surrounding landscape. She went there with a couple of friends, and I used some of those photographs in the paintings. I combined them with my own images, collaging everything together.

For example, in the painting, Edge, the woman was photographed in the studio, but I combined that image with several different images of rocks and waterways, so they're not one-to-one reproductions of a real place.

I
So the paintings aren't completely based on single scenes?

C-T
No. I adapt my source material, assembling from multiple images stitched together. It's really about the feeling of being in the environment rather than documenting one specific place or memory.

Edge, Oil on linen, 100 × 70 cm, 2026

Care and Vulnerability

I
I understand that your paintings often depict women and girls supporting one another yet there are sometimes shown in states that appear injured, exhausted or unconscious. In my own reading this can feel very uncomfortable. You especially see it in the paintings like Making It Through. I think it suggests a form of dependency or a loss of mobility. So how do you understand these dynamics of care vulnerability and reliance between the figures in your work?

C-T
With Making It Through, I imagined it as something quite theatrical. I don't want it to feel as though the figures are literally hurt. It's more like they're performing a role or inhabiting an emotional state.

I
Maybe that's something I'm bringing to the paintings myself.

C-T
I think that's one of the wonderful things about painting. People inevitably project their own experiences onto what they are looking at. Some viewers describe my work as incredibly tender and loving. Others find it unsettling or even disturbing. Isn't it amazing that paintings can evoke those kinds of feelings?

My daughter came into my studio once and asked, "Why are the people in the water?" I didn't want to explain immediately hoping we would give her own interpretation. I asked her, "What do they make you feel?"

She said they reminded her of a feeling free; when you're in the water, happy and calm. She read the paintings as playful and liberating.

I
That's amazing. Everyone really does see something different. You deliberately avoid imposing one fixed narrative?

C-T
Yes. I think that's really important.

Making it Through, Oil on linen, 160 × 120 cm, 2026

I
Looking at the Making it Through, what stood out to me is how the two figures are physically supporting the girl in the centre. You can almost feel the effort they're putting into holding her up.

C-T
Yes, they're really lifting her. I look a lot at European Baroque painting, I was thinking particularly about Peter Paul Rubens. His paintings have such a strong sense of gravity, figures gripping, the weight of bodies being lifted, pulling.
At the time I was making these paintings, many of the women in my life were going through periods of major transition. I wanted the paintings to express collective care. Helping one another through difficult moments or simply the idea of being vulnerable together. I wanted them to be about mutual protection and support.

In Protection, for example, I was thinking about a Käthe Kollwitz sculpture, Mother with two children, 1932–36. The mother hides her children, as though her arms are wings the children are protected by.

Part of the reason I paint woman is simply that I'm a woman. I'm often thinking about intergenerational relationships; mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters and about the vulnerability that comes with ageing. The younger girls also represent memory, or perhaps the inner child, or coming of age. The figures aren't portraits of particular people. The body becomes a way of expressing different psychological and emotional states.

Käthe Kollwitz. Mother with Two Children. 1932-36, cast 1958. Courtesy of MoMA.

I
I really like that. It's difficult to speak for someone else's identity or experience.

C-T
Do you mean in terms of gender?

I
Yes.

C-T
I do think a great deal about feminism and about how social structures have historically placed women in vulnerable positions. Even today we have so far to go.

Protection, Oil on linen, 100 × 70 cm, 2026

Beyond Narrative: Gesture and Symbolism

I
Although you've said you don't want to impose a fixed narrative on your paintings, when I looked at works such as Edge, I couldn't help imagining what had happened before and what might happen next. Will she jump? Will she fall? Will she hurt herself on the rocks? I found myself creating these different scenarios in my mind. So I was wondering, while you were painting, were you thinking about any kind of narrative?

C-T
It's interesting that you think about what comes before and after. For me, she's sheltering herself. She's hidden within this environment. The sun is shining on her back, but she's curled up in a foetal position.

While I was making that painting, I was thinking a lot about Camille Claudel, who was Auguste Rodin's student and lover. She made a sculpture of a woman in a very similar pose, curled in on herself. She had an incredibly tragic life. She contributed to much of Rodin’s work. Her own work often explores the vulnerability of women and the ageing female body, so I was thinking about that particular pose and referencing it. She experienced a severe mental health crisis and her brother had her committed to a psychiatric institution, where she spent the rest of her life. She destroyed many of her own sculptures.

Camille Claudel, L’Homme Penché, about 1886. Courtesy of Artcurial.

I
It’s interesting as a viewer, I felt there was such a strong sense of narrative. Especially since the paintings seem to speak to one another. Edge, for example, feels connected to Shallow. I kept imagining there must be some kind of story linking them together.

C-T
I love that. I wanted the paintings to speak to each other, but each painting is a single emotional moment. I am interested in what the gesture or pose communicates psychologically.

I
So it's more about symbolism than narrative?

C-T
Yes. That's much more important to me than constructing a story.

What I find most rewarding is when viewers create their own narratives. Just like earlier, when you said the paintings made you think about dependence and your fear of dependency, that's a completely valid reading. I'm happy for people to bring those kinds of interpretations to the work.

Shallow, Oil on linen, 160 × 120 cm, 2026

Light, Haloes, and Symbolic Space

I
When I first saw You Call Me Out Upon the Water, what immediately stood out to me was the quality of the light. I was particularly drawn to the way the sunlight catches the figures' hair. Individual strands seem to shimmer in the light. I know you work with studio with friends, women, and girls, which you then merge with landscapes from where you used to live. How do you think about light in your paintings? Do you imagine a particular time of day; sunrise, sunset, midday?

C-T
That painting went through several stages. It was the first painting I made for the exhibition. Initially, I imagined the figures walking towards a source of light in front of them. They were moving through a cave-like space, surrounded by darkness, it almost had the feeling of an eclipse, creating that halo effect.

Later, though, I painted the creak and rocks. I kept experimenting with the lighting. As for the time of day, I honestly don't know. The lighting is deliberately quite ambiguous.

You Call Me Out Upon The Water, Oil on linen, 200 × 160 cm, 2026

I
I wondered whether it was sunset. It has a very calm atmosphere.

C-T
While I was painting it, I found the lighting slightly unsettling because it doesn't behave realistically or coherently. The figures and the environment seem to belong to different systems of light.

I
That's interesting, because to me it felt completely natural. I imagined the light shining through from in front of them.

C-T
In a symbolic sense, that's what I wanted. They are stepping out into a dark unknown, but there is an unexplained light before them.

The Female Gaze

I
There seems to be another layer to You Call Me Out Upon the Water. You mentioned that one of the references was a painting your husband, Gregory Hodge, made of you, based on A Woman Bathing in a Stream by Rembrandt. In both cases, these images of women are produced through the male gaze. You once said that you wanted to be the one making the painting rather than the one being depicted in it.

I really loved that statement. How did this awareness of authorship, gender, and representation shape the work?

C-T
I actually think what you've just said is more interesting than anything I'm about to add.

When Greg asked if he could paint me, I said yes, but only if he painted me in reference to that particular Rembrandt painting. His painting entered a conversation with Rembrandt's, and then I wanted my painting to become a conversation with his.

You're right, there was a certain discomfort in being the object of someone else's gaze. I remember that feeling from when I was a little girl. I had a book of drawings by Peter Paul Rubens, and I can remember looking at all these women and wondering what it must have felt like to be looked at in that way. Even then, I was acutely aware of the painter’s gaze, the viewer’s gaze.

In my painting, I wanted to reverse that relationship. Rather than a single woman being an object, we stand behind the group of figures. Because we're positioned behind them, it's almost as though we're accompanying them or supporting them as they venture forward. We don't have access to their faces or their expressions. It's almost the opposite of objectification.

Rembrandt, A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1654, Oil on wood, 61.8 x 47 cm, Collection of the National Gallery.

I
I found that sentence so powerful—that, as an artist, you wanted to be the one making the painting rather than being the subject of it. It immediately made me think about how, throughout art history, women have so often been represented by men rather than representing themselves.

C-T
Yes. The difference is of an embodied experience.

I
I also feel that the women in your paintings appear incredibly strong. Whether it's mothers carrying children or women physically supporting one another, there's a real sense of strength.

C-T
Recently I came across a post that said that for around ninety-five per cent of human history, women did life together. They gave birth together, raised children together, and supported one another. It's about recognize the importance of women's networks of care.

Intimacy and Emotional Connection

I
Whether there is one figure or several, I feel there's always a remarkable sense of intimacy in your paintings. As if the viewer is being welcomed into a very like private emotional space. How would you define intimacy in your work and broadly what do you understand as the love language between family and friends within these scenes?

C-T
I'm not a touchy person, so it's kind of ironic that what my work are about touch! I think about the body, gestures, touch is a way of talking about relationships. It's a way of symbolizing connections between people.

I
When I look at your paintings, I almost feel like I’m inside the person’s head—I can feel their sadness and an intimate connection with them on the canvas.

C-T
My paintings are about an inner life, an inner experience. Like in Edge, it's about the emotional and psychological state she's in and the position of the body then reflects that.

The sense of touch and intimacy in my work is about connection and tension. Do they feel suffocated, do they feel supported? I am happy for the work to sit with an ambiguous readings.

Overflow, Oil on linen, 70 x 50 cm, 2026

Water, Hope, and Transformation

I
You've previously described water as a language for emotional and psychological states, whether that's treading water, drowning, emerging from the depths, or coming up for air. If you had to choose three expressions that best capture this exhibition, which would they be?

C-T
I think the exhibition is about resilience. I probably wouldn't choose drowning. I'd say treading water and coming up for air, emerging from the depths. I like the terms you chose! I'm also interested in this idea of standing at the edge of the water, the threshold before change and the symbolism of wading through.

I hope there's ultimately a sense of hope in the exhibition. Of being submerged and then emerging transformed. Rather than the exhibition being fatalistic, or about drowning, I want it to suggest renewal and the possibility of change.

I
And crossing a river symbolizing overcoming obstacles.

C-T
I hope the paintings feel hopeful. They acknowledge that transition can be frightening, but also one can find a sense of acceptance and connection in the inevitability of change.

Submerge, Oil on linen, 100 x 70 cm, 2026

Download the interview.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Clare Thackway (b.1984, Canberra, Australia) is an Australian artist who lives and works in Paris. Known for her forthright and intimate portraits and figurative paintings, the body in Clare Thackway’s paintings becomes a semaphore through which she contemplates moments of human experience, from the emotional to the societal. Informed by ideas in psychology, feminism, and the history of painting, she considers how internal and collective experiences affect the ways in which we hold ourselves. The artist works with the fluid associations of cloth and pattern, illuminating the inner threads of our implicit memories and the deep and intricate connectivity between people. Her decisive and scratched back painted marks drag light off the surface of the body, exposing luminous translucent skin. This prudent use of paint gives pulsing life to flesh, revealing the layers that exist subtly underneath.

Clare holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Painting) from the Australian National University, with an exchange to Glasgow School of Art, and graduated from the National Art School Sydney with Honours in Fine Art. Since 2007, she has exhibited regularly in commercial and museum exhibitions and her work is held in private collections in Australia, the UK, Germany, and France.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Hold Tight, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, UK, 2025); Knowing, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2024); Falling, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2024); Patterns Changing, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2023). Her selected group exhibitions include: Art Basel Hong Kong, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Hong Kong, 2026); COIL and ROAR, Civic Art Bureau (Canberra, Australia, 2026); Drape and the Weave, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2025); Silent Presence, Tabula Rasa Gallery with Veenue Gallery (Shanghai, China, 2024); Winter exhibition, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2024); Interconnected, New England Regional Art Museum (Armidale, Australia, 2022); L’Autre, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2021); Unthinkable Fields, ANCA (Canberra, Australia, 2021). Clare has been a finalist in several Australian art awards including the Archibald Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship, the Blake Art Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award (Highly Commended 2017) and was the winner of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2009).