Claudia Goulet-Blais

Griffin x ECU Fellowship Studio Award Winner: Claudia Goulet-Blais

September 1 - December 31, 2025

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.

Bio

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).

Programs

Sunday, November 30 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM – Artist Talk: Live from the Studio (via Zoom)

Sunday, December 14 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM – Open Studio (at Griffin Art Projects)

Friday - Sunday, January 9 - 11 - Youth Hub Exhibition Opening Reception | Hands That Hold

Images 1-3; Courtesy of the Artist. Images 4-10, During North Shore Art Crawl; Photo Credit Jefferson Alade.