Clare Woods

Clare Woods is a British artist, born in Southampton, UK. She studied sculpture  at the Bath College of Art, where she received a BA in Fine Art  in 1994.  Woods  attended Goldsmith’s College in London. It was at Goldsmith's that she began to paint and from where she received  an MA in Fine Art in 1999. 

Woods works from photographs that she takes of scenes that reflect a tension between the human and natural world and the unsettling transformations that occur in nature itself.

“I grew up in the countryside and then came to London and was absolutely petrified.” she said in an interview for the British Council. “I thought every night, I was going to be murdered. I got used to it, although it still doesn’t feel terribly safe. But now when I go back to the countryside it just scares me. It’s probably more scary than London in a lot of ways. I suppose it’s all about what you can’t see, what you imagine to be behind the tree.”

In addition to screenprints and woodblocks, she paints with oils on aluminum and has done many Public Commissions, including a permanent mural for Olympic Park in London, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society.

Woods was elected to London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2022. She will be having solo exhibits this year and in 2024 in galleries in Berlin, Spain, London and Copenhagen.

Clare Woods' works can be found in the permanent collections of London’s British Council, The Arts Council and The London Government Art Collection, The National Collection of Wales, The Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, The Ophiuchus Collection, Geneva, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and other major venues around the world.