Image Courtesy of Claudia Goulet-Blais
Join us on Sunday, November 30 for an Artist in Residence talk with the 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 Open Studios, Claudia will present 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 will culminate in a student exhibition at Griffin in January 2026. More details coming soon.
Inside Claudia’s Griffin Art Projects Residency Studio; Image courtesy of Claudia Goulet-Blais
About Claudia:
Claudia Goulet-Blais (b. 1996, Montréal) is a Vancouver-based photo installation artist whose practice centres on intergenerational kinship and performing for the camera with those close to her. Working with analog photography, ceramics, and archival imagery, she creates photographs and sculptural works reflecting relational dynamics through body language, and gesture. Her work investigates aging, shared memory, and the labour of care, engaging photography as image and object. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and has exhibited at FOFA Gallery, Unit_302, and Gallery 881, with residencies at NES (Skagastrond), Similkameen (Okanagan), and Griffin Art Projects (Vancouver).
We thank Acera Insurance, Bravo Art Projects and Services, North Vancouver Recreation & Culture, The Hamber Foundation and the Michael and Inna O’Brian Family Foundation for their generous sponsorship of our 10th anniversary program.
