ARTISTS STATEMENT
The entanglement of painting and m(otherhood) is foundational to my practice. The term “m(others)” encompasses “mothers” and “others,” including gender non-conforming folks engaged in nurturing life. I was taught to paint when I was little by my mother, who gave up her painting practice to raise me. The idea that one cannot be both an artist and a primary caregiver persists. My ongoing series, Art Work Care Work, represents artist m(others) to raise awareness about systemic barriers for caregivers in the art world. The titles of the paintings are excerpts of interviews with participants about their experiences of art and care, and the interviews shape my formal approach wherein subjects are often in multiple places at once while large areas of the paintings remain intentionally unfinished. My conceptual and formal approach navigates how the cohabitation of art and care can be an exceedingly disruptive force as well as a profound emotional experience that can expand our ideas about art-making and existence. My self-portraits and portraits of others explore the creative potential of m(othering) in establishing a plural and collective vision of human subjectivity as a foil to the dominant Western ideology of rugged individualism. Recent multi-figure self-portraits explore my own feelings of self-dissolution and self-expansion as I navigate becoming a m(other). Centred around the bath as a vessel for myth-making, self-discovery and metamorphosis, this body of work navigates the complex dissolution of the individual self required when one becomes a m(other).
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Claire Drummond is a painter and educator from Tio’tia:ke Montreal who recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing at NSCAD University. She previously completed an MA in Cultural Studies at McGill University specializing in representations of gender and performance in postwar film. Her formal academic training influences her understanding of feminized experience as a microcosm of broader subjective and ecological concerns, and the ways in which her work grapples with what it means to be a woman and what it means to be human today. She is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Scotia Scholar’s Award from Research Nova Scotia (2022-2023), the Judith Jane Leidl Graduate Fellowship (2023), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018), and she was a finalist for the NSCAD University Student Art Award (2023). She has exhibited her work across Canada and is participating in upcoming solo and group exhibitions in her home country and Europe. Her work is held in national and international private collections.
© Claire Drummond