Artist in Residence Talk: Claudia Goulet-Blais

Artist in Residence Talk with GRIFFIN X ECU Fellowship Studio Award Winner Claudia Goulet-Blais; Sunday, November 30, 2025 - 1:00 PM - 2:30PM ( via Zoom Webinar)

Watch the recording of the Artist in Residence Talk with GRIFFIN X ECU Fellowship Studio Award Winner Claudia Goulet-Blais.

Claudia Goulet-Blais research focuses on maternal relationships, exploring the complexities of care and the shifting roles within family dynamics. Working collaboratively with their mother, they examine the nuances of intimacy, distance, and gesture—specifically, the embrace, which has become a recurring motif. The work draws inspiration from 19th-century hidden mother photography, exploring the tensions of physical and emotional proximity and distance, reflecting on mortality and loss, and examining the historical undervaluing of women’s care work.

During her Griffin residency, Claudia has been working closely with her mother to create a new series of images, while also drawing from historical archives to explore how memory and familial relationships are inscribed through photographic and material forms. Her new research has included reading Susan Sontag’s On Women and Annie Parsons’s The Choreography of Everyday Life, which inform her reflections on the body’s language, intimacy, selfhood, and intergenerational connection. Shaped by acceptance, refusal, and transformation, the figures in her work remain intentionally ambiguous in their identities and roles.

At her Open Studios, Claudia presented a range of new material and conceptual experiments, including an in-progress porcelain sculpture and her new photographic series.

She has also mentored high school students from North Vancouver and hosted a student exhibition at Griffin in January 2026.