Claire Henry

By making art objects out of clay; a forgiving material that speaks towards functionality, fragility and beauty, I am interested in redefining the concepts of 'craft' and 'handmade' through my own practice. My work aims to draw the observer into the forgotten, and sometimes mysterious, narrative of the unknown, where my ceramic pieces explore and dissect notions of the uncanny, the unfamiliar, and the collection.  I play with the visual and social lines that exist within the history of ceramic arts, and am fascinated with constructed binaries such as private vs. public, memory vs. nostalgia, and art vs. artifact. I am interested in finding significance and beauty in ordinary objects by investigating display cultures and our human desire to collect and to categorize. In my practice, I create memories within the miniature, where one is automatically drawn to the size, the preciousness of the object, and the relationship that our bodies have to the installation and surrounding environment. I seek out subtle beauties hidden in nature, with the hopes of reviving banal treasures that are woven deep within the folds of discarded memories and urban landscapes.