Claire Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker and ceramicist living and working in Jackson, MS. She received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in 2015, and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2020. She was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship for International Research where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings in southern France in 2018. She was born in Louisiana, raised in Mississippi, and draws heavily from the landscape and atmosphere of the south. Her work explores dreams, personal narrative, memory, time, confusion, happiness, and grief through color, form, texture and pattern. Paintings, prints, and sculpture play with the boundaries of emotional performance through formal qualities as well as the metaphysical relationships created between image and object, with particular attention paid to what is left unsaid or unexamined inside of those relationships. These are poetic gestures that use symmetrical systems to elicit memories or dreams. Between thought and action, between despair and pleasure, there is a suspension, and this work aims to be.