Claire Whitehurst

'Fishtail' - organic abstraction - monotype - rainbow - Agnes Pelton

2022

Claire Whitehurst’s work is at once startlingly lush and shyly particular, like iridescent fishing wire tangled in long grass along the riverbed or water bugs running along the surface of a marsh. Candy colored cellular forms become pond ripples or tree rings - memory recorded or imagined as the coincidence of the natural world and raw emotion. The forms that populate Claire’s paintings vibrate between growth and decay, are shot through with a distinctly queer sensibility that combines the biological and the sensual. Even in work with more muted tones or staid line forms, these paintings are irradiated with a kind of constant becoming, and open up space for a new kind of sense-making. They’re materialist works, in that they insist on the materiality of emotion and its inseparability from the world; here is a body tangled in candy floss or Christmas lights; here are two fingerprints, or two lovers, being pulled both together and apart. Born in 1991 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Claire Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker and ceramicist based in Jackson, Mississippi. Claire received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in 2015, her Post Baccalaureate from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2020. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship for International Research where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings in southern France. She draws heavily from the landscape and atmosphere of the South, exploring queer narrative, memory, time, and identity through color, form, surface and space. Her work plays with the boundaries of emotional reaction through formal qualities as well as through the examination of relationships between image and object.