Artist, Poet, Choreographer and Collaborator.

Clare makes work in performance, site-specific work in the landscape, poetry, music and visual art. Her international career as a dancer, choreographer and director has included fifteen years working in opera and education and community projects. She has been artist in residence at many locations, including The Library of Water, Iceland, Banff in Canada, and at the Centre of the History of Emotions, Queen Mary University, London (Leverhulme), where she produced her Tear Treasury. With visual artist Charlotte Still Clare is the creator/collaborator of WATERWEEK an annual event based in the Pevensey Levels in East Sussex. She is a member of the Cuckmere & Pevensey Levels Catchment Partnership for water management. She also teaches on local creative writing courses, and on the liberal arts programme at Stanford University. Co-founded Elephant – A small press, with long term collaborator designer Raphael Whittle. Recent publications include Poemish & Other Languages (2019, co-editor with Kay Syrad), Gifts (2017), with poems in Envoi, Poems for a Liminal Age, (ed. M. Pannett) and prose in Dark Mountain, ‘Techne’ Edition. Clare co-runs eco-poetics courses with Kay Syrad at the environmental art gallery ONCA in Brighton, Knepp Wildland and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Clare is part of kin’d & kin’d – a composite eco-poet, the creation of Kay Syrad and Clare Whistler, who have been collaborating on a range of art-text projects and eco-poetry courses for several years.

In 2022 the artist performer Clare Whistler and eco poet Kay Syrad came for a weeklong residency at Cape Farewell’s HQ, The WaterShed, exploring in minutia and physically this watery place. The day started with a plunge into the cold waters of the lake and then mapped into a series of tasks – each a recorded exploration. In a world so stressed by the lack of water, its abundance here is at times overwhelming, mapping its past life as a watercress farm. A historically complex series of waterways reflect on sustainable human management, what Robert Macfarlane would call the ‘old ways’. Clare and Kay’s journey through this watery microsite was more slither than ‘on foot’, and their beautiful record of this slithering is celebrated here in words, well-crafted poems and photographs.