Clare Thackway’s paintings centre on the intimate relationships that shape our understanding of selfhood, with a particular focus on intergenerational bonds between women. Working from life and frequently depicting those closest to her, Thackway constructs compositions that are at once deeply personal and quietly archetypal, situating lived experience within broader histories of representation.

Rooted in the European figurative tradition, Thackway’s practice acknowledges the persistence of recurring visual narratives - canonical forms and compositions that continue to shape collective understanding. Drawing on sources ranging from Christian imagery to Jungian theories, Thackway reactivates these structures, layering them with personal histories and contemporary experience. Each painting becomes a convergence of references: art historical, psychological, and autobiographical.

‘Giddy I’ and ‘Giddy II’ portray the artist’s sister with her son. These multi-figure paintings draw upon the visual language of religious iconography - most notably the Madonna and Child - as a means of structuring and reinterpreting contemporary scenes of care, dependency, and connection. In these works, moments of private tenderness are elevated without becoming idealised. A mother holding her child, for instance, becomes both a specific, observed encounter and part of a longer lineage of images through which femininity, motherhood, and devotion have been historically codified.

Yet Thackway’s engagement with these traditions is not devotional, but interrogative. Informed by psychoanalytic and feminist frameworks, her work considers how patterns of behaviour, emotion, and desire are transmitted across generations - not only through genetics, but through proximity, memory, and lived relationships. The body, in her paintings, becomes a site where these inherited and relational histories are held and negotiated. Touch and gesture are central to this enquiry. Figures lean into one another, hold, support, or press against each other. These interactions evoke the entangled nature of connection, which Thackway captures with unique sensitivity.

Central to the artist’s work is the act of women painting women. Thackway approaches the female figure with a sense of embodiment rather than observation, resisting the distance or objectification historically associated with the male gaze. Her figures are not staged for consumption, but encountered with care - rendered with an attentiveness that allows for complexity, sensuality, and subjectivity to emerge on their own terms.

Through this nuanced approach, Clare Thackway constructs a visual language of intimacy that is both grounded and expansive, tracing the ways in which relationships - particularly between women - shape, sustain, and complicate our understanding of who we are.