About

Graduating from UAL Camberwell College of Artists in 2026 with a BA in Fine Art: Painting, Cleave’s practice predominantly involves capturing her friends and family in intimate settings capturing fragments of lived experiences, with a care for people, form, colour and materiality.

These works often depict women in quiet and relaxed social interactions, seemingly unaware of the artist’s or the viewer’s gaze. Aiming to provide an authentic subjective depiction of the female figure whilst capturing specific moments, times and memories. Artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Jennifer Packer and members of The Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant inspire this exploration as they depict specific, everyday scenes with the people closest to them.

Cleave works with a layered and tactile approach, interested in surface and process, using materials such as soft pastel, ink, acrylic, charcoal pencils, oil pastels and printmaking. Mainly presenting her subjects on canvas, paper and board, with an ongoing interest for ceramics as a surface for drawing and painting. These works are often comprised of colour palettes that repeat blue, orange and yellow hues, as they convey personal domestic spaces, while creating calm and joyful elements.

Cleave is also inspired by decorative pattern and symbolic objects as she implements them in her paintings as well as carving them into the ceramic surface, to create a closer relationship between the people and these meaningful ornaments. Through observing her immediate surroundings, Cleave hopes to provide a natural representation for often overlooked moments of quiet pleasure in everyday life, to provoke a sense of shared human experience and appreciation for human connection.