Claire is a multidisciplinary artist who inspects the relationship between human bodies and their environment, especially as it relates to queer identity and the fractured reality of our digital age. Through her artistic process, she pushes the boundaries of her internal, external, digital, and temporal realities. Art-making itself allows Claire to both inhabit and recreate their body, memory, and environment. Claire’s flesh-like constructions of the human body, its surroundings, and digital devices in bright colors and expressive textures reference childhood and the beauty of the mundane. Her current body of work is both joyful and nostalgic.
Claire is a born and raised Montanan. Born just outside of Livingston, raised in Bozeman, and currently based out of Missoula. They are currently completing a Post-Baccalaureate program in oil painting at the University of Montana and are a resident at Wildfire Ceramics Studio. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Montana in 2025, graduating magna cum laude and as a member of the Dean’s list.When Claire isn’t making art, she enjoys working as a sewing machine technician, playing pool, and catching crawdads.
Flesh is an anchor to truth. Flesh is something you can see, feel, smell, touch, love, hate, twist, shape, hold, rip, be with. The skin and bones and muscle of a body hold emotion and memory honestly, in direct exchange with their surroundings. As an artist, I am fascinated by the relationship between said flesh (bodies) and their environment. My art helps me explore feelings of disconnection from my own body, especially as it relates to my queer identity, the fractured realities created in digital media like Instagram, and my personal struggles with depression/anxiety. In my work, I warp and rebuild the body into new representations that attempt to trade the human figure’s meaning as a sex symbol/workhorse/individual for a corporeal conglomerate of sinew, friends, and emotions. As the body changes form, it melds with its surroundings, and its surroundings, in turn, meld with the body. The body becomes everything, and everything around it becomes the body. Objects of routine, creatures of my memory, and patterns take on softer edges and fleshy traits of their own as they contextualize the figure in new scenes and narratives.