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Matter out of Place takes its title from Lauren Elkin’s recent book Art Monsters in which Elkin describes the female body as ‘always matter out of place’ through its refusal to conform and be brought into line by perceived notions of femininity.

The work is rooted in the language of abstract expressionism as a space of painting that holds potential for autonomy and agency while also interrupting, disrupting, and challenging ideas of fixity. This body of work suggests internal landscapes held together by figurative fragments and semi familiar forms. Repeated motifs perform on the surface suggesting the carnivalesque and other worldly spaces. The materiality of making is held within the work where references to a stage-set or performed space is played out. Paper stencils integral to the making of her screenprints are reused as collage within the paintings. Here Clancy brings together painting and printmaking on one surface creating language which is ambiguous, tactile and slippery, where an expansion lives in the gendered, embodied mark. This fluid space of painting speaks to an out-of-place-ness and is at times unruly, untidy and unpredictable, it is matter out of place.

Biography

Clancy is a painter and lecturer in Fine Art Painting at Ulster University Belfast. In 2006 she gained her MFA and later completed a practice led PhD that examined ideas of gendered space through painting practice also at Ulster University (2012). She has exhibited in many group and solo exhibitions, most recently: Difficult Joys, Strule Arts Centre, Omagh (2024), HOUSEHOLD editions, La Roche House, Belfast (2024) Structure (Solo) QSS Gallery & Studios, Belfast (2022), Future Forward, curated by Jane Morrow, MART Dublin and QSS Gallery, Belfast (2022), IMPACT 12, International Printmaking Exhibition, UWE Bristol, (2022). She presented her paper, ‘The Expanded Gesture: Painting Gender and Materiality after De Kooning’, at Painting in the Expanded Field: A Symposium, Crawford College of Art, Cork (2024). Clancy also presented ‘The Act, The Idea and The Thing: Painting as Research’, at the International Congress on Contemporary European Painting, University of Porto, Portugal (2022). Her work is held in public and private collections.

Curated by Dr Louise Wallace