Claire Hurley is an Irish artist based in Limerick whose practice investigates the materiality of the body through expanded sculpture and photography. Working directly with natural and found materials sourced from the landscape, her work foregrounds the interdependence between human presence and ecological processes.
Her projects address climate anxiety, the cultural and material relationships we maintain with place, and the ways individuals and communities shape — and are shaped by — their environments. Claire’s background in Archaeology (BA, University of Galway) and Art and Ecology (Postgraduate Diploma, NCAD) informs a sustained interest in human heritage, ritual, and the varied strategies people use to create meaning.
Photography is central to her process. She frequently creates wearable sculptural forms and documents them in situ through self-portraiture and collaborative photography, using differing sites to modulate narrative and emphasise how external environments reflect, amplify, or alter internal states. When working with biodegradable materials she often returns finished works to the landscape to decompose, allowing natural cycles of decay and renewal to complete the piece and to register temporality within the work.
Material reuse and local sourcing are integral to her methodology: repurposed waste and sustainably harvested organic matter are employed both as sculptural media and as conceptual agents that interrogate personal conditioning and broader environmental concerns. Across media, Claire’s work explores transformation, the untangling of the self, and the porous boundary between body and place, proposing a symbiotic relationship between human embodiment and the living world