Claire Partington

London, UK, based artist Claire Partington is best known for her large-scale ceramic figures and installations.

After studying sculpture at Central Saint Martins in the 1990s, she pursued a career in the museums and galleries that had initially inspired her interest in art and design. She studied ceramics at night school, where she began to make illustrative and narrative figurative works that draw on her interests in art and social history, mixed with a contemporary social commentary and sense of the surreal.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public collections including the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of London, Seattle Art Museum, Ömer Koç Collection in Istanbul, and the Reydan Weiss Collection in Germany.


Artist Statement

For this group of work, I focused on the idea of the Princess in traditional fairy tales and iconic Disney movies and the contemporary idea of Princess—celebrities and influencers documenting their filtered fairy tale life on social media, and the pressures that places on us to achieve the magically unattainable.

My figures take their aesthetic from the material traditions of ceramics and the baroque. Fairy tale talismans are replaced with iconic luxury or fashionable items and the magic mirror is replaced by a cell phone, the magical companions are represented by animals. Using these repeated motifs in my work that relate to the magical fairy tale objects, symbols of portraiture and art history, and the motifs we choose to represent ourselves with every day in our choices of personal and aspirational presentation, I merge these with the fantastical and surreal worlds of traditional narratives to create my own social commentary. My golden-haired maidens may feel familiar but they inhabit their own very distinct and magically unattainable realm.


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