Claire Harmer

6th - 16th March, 2025

Hazards and Offerings is a series of high-fired ceramic and steel sculptures made during the artist’s residency at Northcote Pottery Supplies in 2024. The sculptures engage with diorama as architecture-in-miniature, in moments of tension or precarity. Viewing the diorama as a macroscopic theoretical format, utopic and dystopic landscapes are presented as maps of our present and imaginings of our future. Simultaneously, the work serves as mud-maps to a more intimate internal landscape. For the artist, change and instability felt in the body is translated into form through labour intensive and repetitive material processes. Frozen in moments of growth or collapse, the ruinous spaces of the work hold a stillness, tension and potential. This space outside time is both fictitious and grounded in geography; it’s absence of human form is an invitation to occupy it for a moment. 

Claire Harmer, b. 1997, is a self-taught sculptor living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people. Creating across ceramic, metal and site-specific found material, Harmer’s process is one of constant material experimentation. Using visual language derived from architecture, scientific diagrams and geology, her work expresses a fluctuating sense of alienation from, and connection to, her local environments. Claire is an Art House Milton Intern for 2025, holds a Bachelor of Film Production from AFTRS (2019) and debuted her solo show, Beneath the Topsoil at AIRspace Projects in July 2023.