Fabia Claris

Fabia Claris is a sculptor by training although drawing has always been central to her practice. After graduating in English from Cambridge in 1975 and doing a foundation at Central, she studied sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art from 1981 to 1983 before working as an apprentice to a master carver in York from 1983 to 1985. She subsequently studied anatomy at the Ruskin in 1991 and spent two years as a postgraduate at the Prince’s Drawing School from 2004 to 2006. She is currently concentrating again on three-dimensional work.

Whether she works in three or two dimensions, her approach is similar, and involves a mixture of construction and deconstruction, putting together and taking away. In drawing this translates into a process of repeatedly building up a surface and then carving into it, generally with a rubber.

She is particularly interested in the structure of the human form as a means of conveying aspects of human experience. This is reflected both in her drawings and her three-dimensionaI work in which she uses mainly found materials to construct both light-hearted and more serious pieces about human nature and the human condition. She is currently working on a piece on the Holocaust as well as a series of rather more satirical birds.

Her approach is essentially figurative, although there is an underlying conceptual dimension to her work. She is particularly interested in structure rather than surface appearance as a fundamental means of conveying meaning, and the materials she uses to build up her pieces are therefore very important. Although she sometimes uses materials as she finds them, her method is generally to break them down into their component parts and then reassemble these to create a new raw material of her own.