Claire Ireland was born in 1959. Her work consists of individual hand-built pieces. Working from sheets of clay, she decorates the constructed surfaces and forms with colours and slips, using summated transparent and crackle glazes on selected areas to create contrasting colours and surfaces.
At the moment animal forms pre-dominate her work, but they have become more ambiguous with each new piece. Claire likes them to remind people of creatures that have an element of familiarity about them, but are somehow different. She also works on different scales, making small objects, keepsakes and creatures that can be combined or added to larger constructions.
The images and forms are often an amalgamation of visual information from the present, and ceremonial or tribal forms from somewhere in the past. Claire uses working drawings as the starting point of her pieces and then translates a lot of these ideas into ceramic forms. She also makes fragments in copper, Egyptian paste, wax, gesso, weathered wood and other items from an ever-growing collection of found objects.
Claire was educated at Camberwell School of Art where she achieved a BA Hons in ceramics with a commendation in printmaking. She has had various exhibitions at leading galleries including:
