Claire Elliott

Claire Elliott’s paintings are centered around explorations of the natural world. Her subjects shift between straightforward representations of botanical collections and domestic gardens into an abstract language that seeks to replicate the unruly bounty of plants.

These plants are all cultivated by humans: carefully tended to in orchards, archived in greenhouses and adopted into homes. In all of these spaces, specimens that would never meet in the wild commingle in manmade corrals. Viewed either as aesthetic adornments or utilitarian (but bountiful) agriculture sites, gardens are often associated with the feminine. This dual identity of the beautiful and the functional is central to the paintings themselves. In these works, the rigid grids of the greenhouse contrast with crowded, unusual plant forms.

Claire Elliott is a painter and teacher who lives and works in Portland, OR. She received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2014.

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