Clarity Haynes explores the torso as a site for portraiture, revealing themes of healing, trauma, and self-determination. Haynes is a recent recipient of a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Pollock-Krasner award, and has had solo shows at Brandeis University's Kniznick Gallery and Moravian College's Payne Gallery, among other institutions. In the past year, she has begun a series of paintings of DIY pagan altars, inspired by the creative self-alter-ing and adornment (jewelry, surgeries and tattoos) of her torso portrait subjects. The new works move out from the idea of the body as an altar, into the notion of the homemade personal altar as a space of freedom beyond the framework of major patriarchal religions.
While at MacDowell, Haynes worked on small, trompe-l’oeil paintings of objects that hold sacred meaning, which she thinks of as altar fragments.
