“That we exist is a miracle. Billions of years ago two single cell organisms accidentally merged and from there life on earth as we know it began. Here we are now, two humans, making art together, in a time of climate crisis and a global pandemic trying to make sense of what it means to be alive.
Our work grows from a fascination with the strangeness and mystery of being a living breathing human creature, with all our complex dreams, fantasies, emotions and physical senses. We are interested in how we humans take the chaotic material of our lives and organise it into narratives to create a sense of meaning.
We use ourselves and our experiences as the material of our work but it's not entirely autobiographical, we question the very nature of biography, that process of organising moments of our lives into linear 'plot points' with a clear cause and effect.
The artefacts of our explorations exist as things the viewer can encounter on their own terms, they become elements in their own story. Our fascination is with the subjective experience, the way each of us is in a continuous process of creating our own reality.
An anxiety bubbles through our work, erupting at times from the landscape or nature, at other times from the body. This horror grows from an increasing awareness of the climate crisis, the realisation that what we have done to the planet we have done to ourselves. We feel like Adam & Eve at the end of the world confronting the beauty and terror of existing.”
- Daniel & Clara
Since meeting in 2010 Daniel & Clara have dedicated themselves to a shared life of creative experimentation, working across moving image, photography, performance and mail art to explore the nature of human experience, perception and reality.
The camera is their primary tool, working with both digital and analogue, still and moving images, to investigate the role the photographic image plays in how we create meaning and make sense of the world around us.
Their current projects focus on the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, particularly exploring the climate crisis as a psychological crisis and how the images we create of nature inform our understanding of what nature is and in turn what the human is.
Recent solo exhibitions include Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (2024), Art Exchange, Colchester (2024), Lot Projects, London (2022), 303 Projects, Lowestoft (2022), Big Screen Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2021), By Art Matters, Hangzhou (2021).
Group exhibitions include I’m Here But I’m Not A Cat, SET Kensington, London (2023), Homegrown, Firstsite, Colchester (2022), A Generous Space 2, The New Art Gallery Walsall (2022), Landscape Elsewhere, Calm & Punk Gallery, Tokyo (2022), Breathing the Light, Art Exchange, Colchester (2021), Somewhere Unexpected, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (2021).
Selected screenings include GroundWork Gallery, King's Lynn (2022), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Grand Palais Paris & HKW Berlin (2020), Experimenta Mixtape, BFI Southbank, London (2019), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2019), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019), Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2019).
Throughout 2022 Daniel & Clara presented Landscape Imaginary, a series of exhibitions and events of their work across the East of England. This was accompanied by the publication of the first monograph about their work, available here.
Alongside their own practice Daniel & Clara support other artists through exhibitions, screenings, peer groups and publications. They have curated moving image exhibitions and events in the UK and abroad, and in 2019 they founded Moving Image Artists (MIA).
They currently live on Mersea Island on the Essex coast, UK.
