Claire's paintings are anchered with a strong centre point, allowing her to explore meaning in connection to place.
Working in oils, Claire's painting practice explores ideas of connection and is inspired daily by the landscape she inhabits whether that’s a familiar everyday view or a new place found on while traveling. She is fascinated by the idea of a centre point, a pause, or anchor in an increasingly fragmented world and the idea that places acquire meaning through the connections we make with them. Her paintings almost always feature a solitary tree form or group or the outline of a hill or a single cloud. These solitary forms are places of quiet attention, resilience, and presence and although they are isolated they exist within an intricate network of relationships as they are rooted in the earth, shaped by time, weather, memory, and the lives that surround them.
The process of painting is central to these ideas. Claire builds each work through layers of colour, allowing successive transparent and opaque passages to accumulate over time. These layers create depth, resonance, and a sense of interconnectedness. Colour is very important to her and is a way of strengthening connections within the painting itself, holding moments of stillness while revealing traces of growth, change, and memory.
Alongside her studio practice, Claire works collaboratively with communities through socially engaged art, placemaking, and heritage projects. This aspect of her practice extends and enriches the ideas she explores in her paintings. Working with people to uncover local stories, celebrate shared histories, and create meaningful responses to place, she seeks to strengthen connections between individuals, communities, and the environments they inhabit.