In 2018, Daniel & Clara’s films shifted from brightly coloured, alchemical, magical motion pictures to a focus on British landscapes and the figures that inhabit them. What is fascinating about this turn to the countryside is how nearly all these films feel like ghost stories—imbued with a residual horror, a haunting eeriness that bleeds into their deeply subjective impressions of place. Their work reveals how a body in space or an atmospheric location begins to tell a story, even when we don’t quite know what that story is.
Bradley Tuck
In 2018, Bradley Tuck (Exploding Appendix) began a twelve-part interview series with Daniel & Clara, the moving image artists who have been creating an extensive body of work since they met in 2010. Our ambitious project was an experiment in long-form interviews, unfolding over an entire year and exploring various aspects of Daniel & Clara’s practice. However, the twelfth and final part of the series was never written. Intended to reflect on the collaboration and draw together the themes of the year, it felt premature to conclude, leaving the series ambigiously open-ended.
This Exploding Appendix salon will act as the long-awaited twelfth part, revisiting the original series and examining Daniel & Clara’s work from 2018 to the present day. We will explore their return to the UK and their growing focus on the British countryside as a central subject in their projects, including Avebury Imaginary (2019–Present), Landscape Imaginary (2020–Present), Mail Art (2018–Present), Birding (2023), The Lost Estate (2024), Waiting for Bas (2024), and Birds and Beasts (2025).
If for some reason you can’t make it and you already bought a ticket, please release it so others can come to the event. You can also email us at explodingappendix@gmail.com for any inquiries.
Since meeting in 2010 Daniel & Clara have dedicated themselves to a shared life of creative experimentation, working across moving images, photography, performance and mail art to explore the nature of human experience, perception and reality.
The camera is their primary tool, working with both digital and analogue, still and moving images, to investigate the role the photographic image plays in how we create meaning and make sense of the world around us.
Their current projects focus on the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, particularly exploring the climate crisis as a psychological crisis and how the images we create of nature inform our understanding of what nature is and in turn what the human is.
Recent solo exhibitions include Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (2024), Art Exchange, Colchester (2024), Lot Projects, London (2022), 303 Projects, Lowestoft (2022), Big Screen Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2021), By Art Matters, Hangzhou (2021).
Group exhibitions include I’m Here But I’m Not A Cat, SET Kensington, London (2023), Homegrown, Firstsite, Colchester (2022), A Generous Space 2, The New Art Gallery Walsall (2022), Landscape Elsewhere, Calm & Punk Gallery, Tokyo (2022), Breathing the Light, Art Exchange, Colchester (2021), Somewhere Unexpected, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (2021).
Selected screenings include GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn (2022), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Grand Palais Paris & HKW Berlin (2020), Experimenta Mixtape, BFI Southbank, London (2019), Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2019), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019), Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2019).
Throughout 2022 Daniel & Clara presented Landscape Imaginary, a series of exhibitions and events of their work across the East of England. This was accompanied by the publication of the first monograph about their work, available here.
Alongside their own practice Daniel & Clara support other artists through exhibitions, screenings, peer groups and publications. They have curated moving image exhibitions and events in the UK and abroad, and in 2019 they founded Moving Image Artists (MIA).
They currently live on Mersea Island on the Essex coast, UK.