Maeve van Klaveren: Rhythms in the Everyday

A woman lies her cat pressed against her cheek. A hand lifts a veil of sheer fabric to glimpse birds sitting in the branches of trees, or places vases of flowers onto a table. Through quiet, tactile moments like these Maeve van Klaveren captures the gentle pleasures of daily life and a feeling of connectedness to nature. Each drawing in Rhythms in the Everyday, her solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth, pays tribute to the beauty and resonance of the unnoticed.

Van Klaveren’s compositions are drawn from her daily observations and thoughts, which she records in written form before using found imagery and her own photographs to imagine a visual narrative that slowly evolves through the mark-making process and her engagement with colour.  While the spaces she depicts are recognisably domestic, the soft textures and powdery tones complicate our sense of time and space, creating a languid, dreamlike atmosphere in which the boundaries between interior and exterior, the physical and the emotional, begin to merge.

This is most apparent in works such as This is where I want to be and White Garden, where a cat appears alongside the figure. In both pieces, the feline seems to echo the figure’s posture and presence, acting almost as an extension of her body or emotional state. Here, the cat is not simply a companion, but a reflection of the figure’s inner world – another limb, another mood – blurring the line between self and other, subject and setting.

 

Elsewhere, the unconscious mind is evoked through natural landscapes. In Old Tree, for instance, the branches appear to stretch outwards from the figure herself, while in What is Waiting for Me, the figure is absent except for a hand pulling back a curtain to reveal a surreal view of mottled trunks – slender and stark as bones. While these works suggest a closeness with nature, they also express a sense of longing – for stillness, for connection, for a world just beyond reach.

 

This emotional register carries through in the recurring motif of picked flowers, which bloom and droop in various vases or lie as single stems on the pillow of a bed. There is a familiar pleasure in their beauty and ephemerality, but like the fruit assembled on tabletops, they also serve as memento mori – subtle reminders of life’s transience. This is underscored by the soft blurring of colour and line, creating the impression of the image fading before our eyes. In Rising, a black smudge on the petal of a white lily hints at the beginnings of decay. The atmosphere in this work feels more insular than in others: black curtains are drawn, long shadows stretch across the table. And yet, it is the presence of nature –the flowers, a pear, a shell – which brings light, both literal and symbolic.

 

The shell in this work is what Van Klaveren refers to as an ‘ensouled object’ – something that carries the memory of the figure who once collected or observed it. These objects, which recur throughout her practice, serve as vessels for reflection and feeling; they offer comfort, continuity, and the potential for replenishment. In What is Waiting for Me, for instance, a pebble sits on a windowsill like a talisman, a conduit between inner and outer worlds.

 

In this way, van Klaveren hints at stories without fully revealing them, allowing the subconscious to speak. Her works invite us into a tender space between the everyday and the unknowable – where the ordinary becomes mysterious, and the passing moment is held just a little longer.