Portrait of Clare

The Portrait of a Writer

Clare Wright is an Australian writer changing the way we think about history and how it is shaped by the acts of many distinct and varied actors. Clare is a mother, an intellectual, an artist and a committed community leader; all sides of an identity in a constant fight for her own attention. “At home it seems I’m hanging clothes all the time” she told me the day she sat for this portrait.

Clare leaves ideas for others to pick up, packaged in sentences and paragraphs, wrapped inside books and speeches; some are traces of the world she sees, some are plans for the world she’d like the next generation to inhabit. They are not heavy words; neither technically complex nor abundant in poetic fluff. They are markings of a territory on which she has set her eye. And there, women are nowhere else other than front and centre. With every one of these words Clare is saying “I am here”.

“Portrait of Clare” is an interactive work that responds to a Twitter feed set up specially for Clare Wright, translating the presence of her words into visual compositions rendered via a game engine.