Rachael Clewlow / Tees Colour Register (Window Sections 1-6)
Tees Colour Register (Window Sections 1-6)
2025
Suite of six prints
Edition of 6 (+2 AP)
Archival pigment print on Marrutt Fine Art Production 316gsm paper
21 x 29 cm (each print, unframed)
This extremely limited edition print has been produced to accompany Clewlow’s large scale vinyl installation, Tees Colour Register for Middlesbrough Railway Station and her parallel solo exhibition at Platform A gallery. This work was commissioned by Navigator North as part of their ‘Most Creative Station’ programme and acts as an architectural intervention, occupying the 50-meter long expanse of upper windows in the station concourse.
Tees Colour Register (Window Sections 1-6) replicates the composition of these windows but also introduces textual elements that relate to Clewlow’s research process for the production of the work, which saw her travel the entire Tees Valley rail network, recording images and data for each minute of her journeys. The prints celebrate her unique approach to colour, which is rigorous and methodical but equally balanced with an instinctive and intuitive understanding of it’s properties and effects.
Rachael Clewlow (b.1984) is a painter and printmaker who has created a visual language that reflects an obsessive desire to map out and document her own experiences of the world. Her work follows a tradition of reductive abstract painting, informed by the aesthetics of cartographic design but shaped by her love of colour.
Rachael Clewlow was born in Middlesbrough and is now based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She graduated from Newcastle University with a Fine Art BA in 2007. She exhibits her work in galleries nationally and internationally. An ambitious new work Tees Colour Register was recently commissioned for Middlesbrough Railway Station.
Extracts from Rebecca Morrill’s exhibition text:
“Seen in the context of art history, Clewlow’s practice is a continuation of over a centenary of geometric abstraction. This type of art – which evolved after photography’s invention displaced painting’s representation role – was initially driven by a desire to make works that were wholly non-objective, that is, having no references outside of themselves: art for it’s own sake. Clewlow’s work, while aesthetically similar to the paintings by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) or Bridget Riley (b. 1935), is simultaneously abstract and representation, and rooted in the physical world.
Clewlow’s art process involves three discrete stages: ‘data collection’ in the field; ‘distilling and interpreting’ at the desk; and ‘making’ in the studio. Tees Colour Register both typifies and expands the approach she has developed over two decades. For many years, the data collection phase involved planning and undertaking walks on foot, during which information was captured in the form of written notes detailing time, place and observation. For Tees Colour Register, train journeys became the mode of transport for the first stage. Travelling across the Tees Valley railway network – from Bishop Auckland to Saltburn, and Whitby to Hartlepool – she recorded in words and photographs, what she saw through the window, once every minute for each route.
Clewlow’s process for choosing what she noted down was intuitive, with moments of vibrancy often capturing her attention. The descriptions range from the fixed (‘Danby Station’) to the fleeting (‘Two Cyclists’), the specific (‘Long Yellow Pipe’) to the prosaic (‘Tunnel’). In total, the records form a rich portrait of an area that is itself enormously varied, as it shifts through urban and rural areas, in a landscape where industrial, agricultural and pastoral abut.
Back at her desk, Clewlow reviewed the 212 photographs, cross-referencing these visual records with her written notes, and selected five colours from each. These hues form her overall palette for the project: 1,060 distinct hues in a polychromatic spectrum that functions as the basis for all the subsequent works in the series.
The vinyl mural for the station concourse windows comprises 492 colours from the palette – two to three for each place – in thick vertical stripes. This composition has been replicated as a limited edition print in six parts, one for each window, annotated with Clewlow’s text descriptions. At times, these disrupt expectations when locations described have real life colours at odds with her chosen hue: the famously bright blue Tees Transporter Bridge being a deep orange, for example.
Taken as a whole, Tees Colour Register presents a joyous, technicolour vision of a region that is often maligned for an assumed bleakness in its post-industrial vistas. Seen through Clewlow’s eyes, there is order, beauty and unending potential.”