Bio

Claire McNamara (she/her) is a Canadian oil painter of white settler descent, currently based out of the ancestral and unceded Indigenous territory of the Mi’kmaq Nation, in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario (2020), and a Masters of Fine Arts from NSCAD University (2024).

Artist Statement

McNamara’s practice investigates her lived experiences of girlhood through lenses of gesture, obsession, and temporality. Her work employs an intersectional feminist methodology to question and critique the hierarchies within the canon of a white euro-centric ‘art history,’ through the subversion of ‘Taste' and skill. Influenced by familial imagery, movement and performance, and classic myth, paintings beam with poetic tension and come together in a garden of watery dreams. Urgent brushstrokes and pastel tenderness conceptuality flirts with the fluidity and malleability of the memory behind each piece. Paintings serve as a love letter to the artist’s past; of childhood bedrooms, ballet classes, pale blue floral sheets, sun-bleached photographs, and of princes and fairies, reunited in the innocent understanding of intimacy and love that is held in youth.

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