British installation artist Claire Marion Black works across film, photography and sculpture, creating captivating large-scale immersive environments. Her ambitious works transport viewers into meticulously crafted dreamscapes and ritualistic landscapes, inviting them to step beyond everyday perception into realms where experience and reflection intertwine.
Black’s artistic methodology is informed by Charles Pierce’s philosophical theory of Thirdness, exploring the crossroads between experience, reaction, and reflection. Through her multidisciplinary approach, she creates spaces that function as experiential thresholds – spaces where viewers become active participants rather than passive observers. Her installations incorporate elements of world-building, establishing immersive contexts that challenge conventional relationships between art and audience.
For Hidden Door’s 2025 Festival, Black presents her evocative short film Swallow, the Sound of my Voice, featuring dancer Rachel Tomb and D A W N, which comprises Light of Dawn, a wooden billboard with LED lights and plywood lettering, and Ribs, a porcelain rib bone hanging sculpture with metal butchers hook.
The film is projected at an almost life-sized scale, creating an imposing visual presence while inviting intimate engagement, accompanied by a carefully composed audio soundtrack and captioned subtitles. In previous exhibitions, this piece has been projected onto a six-by-four-foot board distressed to resemble washed-up flotsam from the mythical island portrayed in the film. The looped projection creates a cyclical experience, reinforcing the nonlinear nature of reflection central to Pierce’s theory, while inviting viewers to actively participate in the construction of meaning.
D A W N was born from immersive research into foundational ancient Indian philosophy texts, The Upanishads, where in the Ashmavedha, the ceremonial horse sacrifice ritual, all the parts of the horse are considered and meditated upon as parts of the universe. The beginning of the ritual is “ The head of the sacrificial horse is the Dawn, its eye is the Sun…” it goes on “ the back of the sacrificial horse is heaven, its bones the stars”. This lyrical and beautiful ritual has been interpreted and contextualised by Black in the form of light and ceramic sculpture, performative ritual and film.
Find out more at instagram.com/_art_of_claire
