Claire Maria Carey is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist who graduated with distinction from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, in 2025. She was shortlisted for the SSA New Graduate Award and has exhibited with them at the beginning of this year. She also was awarded the Robert Gordon University’s Heritage and Purchase Award. She has also presented work in group exhibitions including the Meffan Winter Show, positioning her practice within an emerging generation of Scottish artists.
Carey’s work utilises the body and the powerful nonverbal communication held within its language. She picks apart our gendered experience, social expectations and gender politics. Through a measured and sensitive practice, she endures states of tension, anticipation, attending to the subtle ways vulnerability and resilience are simultaneously produced. Her visual language is informed by restraint and repetition, allowing form to register psychological pressure and emotional proximity allowing for interpretive meaning.
The exhibited work extends Carey’s inquiry into lived precarity within patriarchy and the quiet operations of power dynamics that shape behaviour and self-perception and preservation. Her work invites sustained engagement and embodied reflection, where ambiguity, discomfort and tenderness remain productively provocative.
