Claire Drummond
Home: Elgin, Quebec
Title: I’m still such a victim of this hierarchical notion of art-making and just being like “no one wants to see me make a sock”. I don’t know! A lot of my stuff is so family orientated. I think about, “What am I doing now? I’m darning socks and knitting sweaters, I want to make a new slip-cover for my couch”, it’s all so home and family oriented — is that, is that okay? It’s like, I’m not a man sculpting. Should I be a man sculpting something? – Portrait of Hannah Goodman (Hannah Isolde) and Chloé
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 91 x 121 cm
Website: clairedrummondart.com
Instagram: @claire__drummond
ARTIST STATEMENT
This portrait depicts Montréal-based artist and mother Hannah Goodman. The compositional approach of the painting is directly shaped by an audio interview conducted with Hannah, in which we discussed her experiences at the intersection of art-making and caregiving. The title of the work is also a direct quote from this interview. The painting features deliberately hasty paint handling while parts of the figure and ground are left intentionally unfinished. These formal decisions seek to mirror the interrupted and disrupted conditions of making art as a primary caregiver, while also offering a vision of creativity and humanity embedded in community and care. This painting is from a broader series entitled Art Work Care Work, which seeks to confront the persistent idea that one cannot be both an artist and a primary caregiver, and to challenge the belief that art that focuses on maternity and domesticity is aesthetically inferior and politically inconsequential.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Claire Drummond (b. 1993) is the 2025 recipient of the Joseph Plaskett Postgraduate Award in Painting. Her work engages the transformative potential of the subject of mothering — which has historically been simultaneously idealized, overlooked and devalued — with a studio practice based between Montréal and Chicago. The submitted painting is part of Drummond’s broader project to investigate how caregiving can generate new approaches to figurative painting. Her current practice examines representations and inherited ideals of motherhood in European painting, exploring how myths of maternity can be reimagined through repetition, gestural mark-making, and a protean approach to colour and light. Drummond completed her MFA at NSCAD University in 2023. Other awards include a Research and Creation grant from Canada Council for the Arts (2025), the Judith Jane Leidl Gradate Fellowship (2023) and the Scotia Scholar’s Award from Research Nova Scotia (2022-2023). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including with Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montréal, QC), Janey Gallery (Cambridge, ON) and Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL) as well as at art fairs such as Plural, Art Toronto, and Future Fair, NY.