Clare Woods has been creating art for as long as she can remember, whether with clay, wool or paints. Because of this, she decided to study art, which landed her a graphic design job before later progressing into web design.
As her children grew older, she found more time for painting, enough to be able to start presenting and selling her very own work and feed her passion for fabulous, unique accessories.
“I have been included in several exhibitions over the last couple of years, and my style has been changing as I grow and learn,” Woods said.
Through her experience in web design and time at home nursing a broken knee, she was able to create her brand, Clare Woods Art, along with an e-commerce website for her to sell her creations online.
Woods wanted to create a wearable art range that was fun, bold, colourful and vibrant while simultaneously one hundred percent unique, as no two sets of earrings are ever the same.
“Each piece is created from a unique original artwork, and all are hand-painted and varnished,” she explained.
She also wanted to create a product that was safe to wear as she had found that over the years, many earrings left her ears feeling irritated, which is why all her earrings are made with sterling silver to keep ears healthy and prevent irritation. She also uses Posca acrylic markers to create the designs and varnish with gloss to bring out the vibrancy of the colours.
Wood’s is currently supplying to a store at the southernmost point in New Zealand on Stewart Island. For her next collection, she will be supplying earrings in the shape of the island for tourists to purchase and fondly remember the place by.
She is also working on a new series called ‘Sensibility’ where she creates hand-painted pages using acrylic paint on semi-transparent papers while experimenting with textures and patterns using tools to remove and add paint where needed.
“I have created hundreds and hundreds of these pages or swatches. I have individual drawers for the colours. That's my left-hand brain at work. Organised chaos.”
Her previous series ‘Floribunda’ and ‘Archifull’ were very experimental phases that drew on mark-making techniques and patterns used in prior art.
A typical day for Woods starts with hot coffee in the morning with her husband and their dog Harvey. Then she works from her home office, keeping up with orders, clients, couriers and everything in between.
Her hopes for the future are to stock her wearable art within many more New Zealand boutiques, galleries and gift shops, essentially anywhere that loves colourful, unique and fun New Zealand-made accessories, along with creating many more styles for people to enjoy and wear proudly.
