Claire Weissman Wilks. Biographical notes

Claire Weissman Wilks - sculptor, lithographer and painter Toronto-based sculptor, lithographer and painter, Claire Weissman Wilks has work in numerous institutional and private collections, and has been exhibited all over the world. Six volumes devoted only to her drawings and sculpture have been published over the last fifteen years.

Several writers have called on her drawings to accompany their work, among them DM Thomas, In the White Hotel; John Montague, The Love Poems; and Ludwig Zeller, Totem.

'... The relationship of the poems [in A Time to be Born] to the illustrations by Claire Weissman Wilks is new and defamiliarising. Wilks's pencil pictures have a kind of visceral lyricism, in constant dialogue with the poetry, mediating the dreaming inwardness of the cycle of gestation and birth with a visionary intimacy that is never wholly free of nightmare. Between the impossibly spread legs of the dreamy woman who appears beside Couzyn¹s preface, crowds a turbulent pile of babies, reminiscent of some Michelangelesque scene of bodies falling into the abyss. ... Wavy drifts of pencil-lines display hair that spreads to mantle the whole body so that the figure seems a cosmos herself, Gaia perhaps, innumerable sucklings. Couzyn focuses the experience of childbirth as a spiritual quest, in which the Grail of pure insight is transiently achieved .The idea of vision is given body by the illustrations, moulded maternal forms like mountains folded inwards or erupting; fanatically solipsistic faces of mother and child emerge from the blurred bulk of dark shading with sharp clarity. The two are forever caught in a stressful interchange of becoming one or drifting apart. Wilks's mothers have disproportionately large hands and feet; their bodies are inchoate, invaded, billowing. Far-away-eyed, absorbed, they inhabit an inhuman threshold. When they walk free, Wilks's women are calm, dreamy, restored to themselves; with the child, they burst open like pods of pain or seem to fall through space.'

- Stevie Davies, PN Review

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