Clare Henderson has been chosen as the Ipsos B&A fine print artist for 2025.
Ipsos B&A (and before that B&A) has been supporting up-and-coming artists and arts-related organisations for over 37 years. This includes a collaboration with the The Graphic Studio in Temple Bar, the oldest fine art print studio in the country.
“We are delighted to share that Clare Henderson has been chosen as the Ipsos B&A fine print artist for 2025,” said Luke Reaper, CEO Ireland, Ipsos B&A.
“Over the past 37 years, we have made it our mission to support the arts by commissioning both emerging and existing talent, and we are immensely proud of our dedication to both the artists and the arts community. Over this time, we have been collaborating with The Graphic Studio, Ireland’s oldest and largest fine art print studio, in creating our annual Christmas Prints. And as part of our commitment to supporting the arts, we also proudly serve as a Gold Ambassador for The Abbey Theatre and sponsor the Graham Wilkinson Graphic Studio Dublin Print Prize at the RHA Annual Submission Exhibition.”
Henderson was born in Dublin in 1981 and she began her art training at Ballyfermot Senior College and went on to study Fine Art Print at NCAD. After graduating in 2005 she began making prints at Graphic Studio Dublin and held her first solo exhibition at Monster Truck Gallery in 2006. She won the Graham Wilkinson printmaking award, sponsored by Ipsos B&A, at the RHA Annual Summer Exhibition in 2017.
Her three prints for Ipsos B&A, Night Drive 1, 2 and 3, bear rapt witness to the artist’s fond childhood memories of long night-drives between Dublin and Clifden with her parents. Her prints re-imagine the familiar forms of Connemara’s landscape from this wholly novel perspective — exploring those liminal moments between night and day, sleeping and waking, when the solid everyday reality of lakes and mountains gives way to a haunting, dream-like region of mysterious shapes and shadows, darkness and light, a magical oneiric interzone in which anything is possible and nothing is what it seems.
In order to achieve the misty light that seems to shimmer and glow from her prints, Clare combined many strata of deeply etched, coarse and grainy aquatints. Many of the printing plates used spit-bite — painting the plate with acid — which helped create her characteristic layers of soft tone. These plates were printed on top of one another, sensuously combining light and shadow to produce a uniquely atmospheric and evocative body of work.
