Claudia Clare
Feminist Satire. No Safe Spaces
Claudia Clare
(b. 1962) is an artist whose work they don’t want you to see. To them, Clare is an Islamophobe, a transphobe and a whorephobe. But to those who can look beyond labels, Clare is a satirical ceramicist who transforms the darkest stories into works of exquisite beauty.
She is a woman who knows her craft. After training as a painter at the Camberwell School of Art in the 1980s, Clare completed an apprenticeship with Winchcombe pottery. In 1997, she became a regular contributor to the magazine Ceramic Review, and a decade later completed a Ph.D. at the University of Westminster.
A published author, Clare’s book Subversive Ceramics traces the hidden history of pots as propaganda across millennia. She believes ceramics has long been dismissed as a domestic craft, too functional to enjoy the status of ‘fine art’. But in creating work that is at once public, political and executed with supreme skill, Clare defies the derision of elitist artistic groupthink.
Public museums, private galleries and even pop-up spaces in shopping centres have exhibited Clare’s work. Latterly she has collaborated with grassroots women’s organisations, incorporating the ritualistic smashing of pots into feminist activism. But for over a decade now, Clare’s career has been punctuated by controversy and cancellation.
