Claire Ritchie

Claire Ritchie graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2024, receiving a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art (including Dean’s list), specialising in painting. She has recently been selected for the RDS Visual Art Awards, Dublin and was longlisted for the Freelands Painting Prize 2024. Recent exhibitions include: RDS Visual Arts Awards 2024, RHA Dublin; Royale Arcade Academy Exhibition 2024, Arcade Studios, Belfast; The Shape of a Pocket, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, 2024; Lines of the Land, An Chead Tine Gallery, Kilkenny, 2024; and the Belfast School of Art Degree Show, 2024.

Her practice is rooted in the expanded field of painting, where she explores the physicality of the medium and challenges traditional notions of how a painting can exist. By incorporating reclaimed wood and found materials, each bearing the layered histories of their previous lives, she creates structures and wall-mounted assemblages that can push beyond the boundaries of two-dimensionality.  Through this process, the conventional materials of painting are unravelled, allowing the components to find a new existence.

By disrupting the traditional methodical approach to painting, she shifts the focus from the pictorial to the material essence of the work. Her paintings are pared down to minimalist compositions where irregular shapes, textures, materials, and colour become the central elements, and the pictorial function of painting is abandoned in favour of an exploration of its “objectness.”