For her presentation at the Helvetia Art Foyer, Clare Goodwin brings together assemblages, ceramics, objects and textiles that extend her long-standing investigation into domesticity, material memory and the social structures of everyday life. At the centre stands a large platform: part temporary territory, part island, part utopian social space. Goodwin creates an environment in which works enter shifting relations, hovering between sculpture, installation and social proposition.
Goodwin examines the domestic sphere as a space where private life and wider social systems converge. Tables, chairs, mirrors and cupboard fronts appear not as neutral forms, but as carriers of use, habit, aspiration and desire. Yet her approach is not nostalgic. Rather than preserving the past, Goodwin works with existing materials to ask how inherited forms might be reactivated in the present.
This is particularly visible in her assemblages. Salvaged door fronts, cabinet panels, tabletops, mirrors and other furniture fragments are not disguised or radically transformed. Instead, they are selected, deconstructed, arranged and recomposed until a new internal logic emerges. Rooted in the geometries of domestic life, these familiar codes are unsettled through displacement, fragmentation and reconstruction. Utility gives way to speculation.
Trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art in London, Goodwin continues to work from painting as the foundation of her artistic practice. Her assemblages and ceramics carry a painterly understanding of rhythm, proportion, surface, colour and composition. What she develops on canvas is here translated into space: planes become objects, edges become architectural lines, and colour becomes material presence. By introducing weight, tactility, scale and use value, the assemblages and ceramics push beyond painting, while retaining it as a way of thinking: a compositional force linking abstraction, object and lived architectural space.
For the finissage, Goodwin will expand the exhibition through a new performance. Conceived as social choreography, it investigates how objects, gestures and domestic environments shape behaviour, aspiration and social conduct. Like her assemblages, the performance works through fragmentation, deconstruction and reconstruction: familiar gestures, roles and social codes are taken apart and rearranged into a new constellation. Between ritual and failure, the performance explores class, cultural conditioning, gender norms and resistance. Awkwardness, repetition and uncertainty enter the space as active forces, suggesting that everyday life is already theatrical — a continual rehearsal of social roles, expectations and transgressions.
At the Scale of Living proposes the domestic as a field of contemporary social and imaginative possibility. Goodwin asks how interiors shape us, how objects carry systems of value, and how inherited forms might be reassembled rather than discarded — imagining how what already exists might be inhabited differently.
