​About

 

Claire Shakespeare (b. 1998, Stourbridge, UK) lives and works in London having graduated from Fine Art Painting (BA Hons) at the University of Brighton in 2022. Their practice captures the everyday experience through an investigation of improvisation and chance within painting. Shakespeare has had two solo shows including Wobbly Knee with Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne in 2023 and Frontal Dancer at the Fitzrovia Gallery, London in 2022. Shakespeare has since curated multiple group shows including Looking Down / to the Ground at Organ Projects, Brighton in 2025 and Home. home. – a flat exhibition in Bethnal Green, London in 2024.

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View CV here

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Email claire.shakespeare@outlook.com

Instagram @claireshakespeare_

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Artist Statement

 

My practice centres on process-based painting, operating at the intersection of abstraction and representation. Through an ongoing negotiation between intention and chance, works examine the dialogue between materiality, image, and the inner self within the parameters of painting. Informed by close-up photographs of everyday encounters: pavements, shadows, and marginal artefacts such as flowers, discarded plastic, or pieces of string, these images form a personal archive, marking time and place while recording moments of quiet, often solitary observation. Once photographed, these fragments detach from their original context and undergo material transformation, moving from photo, to drawing through to painting. Form and colour take precedence, positioning these elements as provisional “props” within a visual staging of lived experience. Through repeated cycles of layering, erasing, and reworking, the compositions become frameworks for open-ended investigations, foregrounding the tensions, contradictions, and satisfactions inherent in painting. By amplifying the overlooked and reconfiguring the everyday, works hover between presence and absence, certainty and hesitation, where perception and material enquiry continually mediate one another.

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