1275 Minnesota St /
Nancy Toomey Fine Art
Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Claire Burbridge titled Peripheral Visions on view from August 14 to September 28, 2024. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.
The public is invited to meet artist Claire Burbridge at the gallery on Saturday, September 7, from 4pm to 6pm.
Essay by Emily Dara Shinn
Peripheral: the outside, surface, or superficial; the minor, inessential, or secondary.
Vision: the ability to perceive; eyesight, optics; conception, idea, insight.
Claire Burbridge captures the essence of earthly realms unseen, overlooked, and uncharted. Comprised of pigment, terrestrial ingredients, scientific inquiry, and an empathic will, her work balances gracefully between a challenge of perception and an encouragement to wonder. The title of this show, Peripheral Visions, illuminates a core tenet of the artist’s practice and ethos: there is much to discover at the edges of our senses, and a significance to all things in the natural world. Each piece on view is a reminder that the periphery is not what a standard definition would imply. As Burbridge shows us, opening our senses to the peripheral is a means of getting closer to the essential, the unifying, the whole.
Surrounded by the rich landscapes of Southern Oregon, the subject matter Burbridge gravitates to is informed by what she describes as “sacred spots”–dynamic mountain forests, fecund backyard gardens, and familiar neighborhood trees. Though intricately detailed and conscientiously attuned to authenticity, realistic plant portraiture is not the goal. “The pieces are a platform for me to express how I am affected and transformed by being there, a state of continuous communion with the atmosphere of these places, so familiar to me,” she explains. Transformation is key to the works on view. Materializing her process, they display evolutions in her experience and perception, emulating the transformative cycles in nature that inspire her.