Where the Pavement Ends

Opening night: Thursday 14 August, Late Night Art East 6–8:30pm

Where the Pavement Ends is a solo presentation of work by QSS artist Claire Ritchie. Guided by instinct and curiosity, Ritchie’s work can be viewed as an accumulation of movement, thought and consideration, a site where multiple meanings come to rest.

Where the Pavement Ends is an invitation to stray from the familiar – an embrace of the unplanned and instinctive. In her studio practice, much like the wandering observer, a modern-day flâneur, Ritchie allows spontaneity and improvisation to guide the process, responding intuitively to material and form.

For Ritchie, the studio becomes a kind of terrain, an active site of exploration where materials drift, settle, and are reconfigured. Working with gathered fragments of discarded materials and reclaimed objects, drawn to their quiet histories and echoing Pablo Neruda’s Toward an Impure Poetry, she finds beauty in the imperfect and the weathered, objects that resist resolution and invite reflection on memory, impermanence, and the layered narratives embedded in the overlooked. 

“The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.” 

Toward An Impure Poetry by Pablo Neruda

Motifs from coastal landscapes – weathered structures, shifting shorelines, and traces of human intervention, where the natural and the constructed collide filter into her work through assemblage, painting, and sculpture. This work has emerged from wandering, through studio, edge land and surface. Flânerie reimagined as method: environmental, processual and slightly off map.