Claire Paul

Claire Paul is an artist living and working on Awabakal Land. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Distinction) from the University of New South Wales in 2022. Since then, she has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Australia and been selected as a finalist and place winner in prizes including the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize, the Brenda Clouten Memorial Scholarship Prize, and the Canberra Contemporary Photography Prize.

Her practice centres on methodologies that embrace slowness, echoing the rhythms of the natural world to promote mindful presence through observation and grounding. Her pieces are photographic portraits of place engaging with the natural world and its occupants, both human and non-human. Rejecting extraction and the hyperactivity of contemporary life, Paul works with long-exposure pinhole photography, foraging, alternative photographic development, and screen-printing. These slow processes capture extended moments of time, where contemplation and connection take place.

Through the conscious selection of materials and processes, she engages in a collaboration with the environment with less attention paid towards achieving technically rendered results, and a fascination lying within the unpredictable outcomes of her practice.

Claire also works across Maitland Regional Art Gallery and MAC yapang in public programming and visitor services.