ARTIST STATEMENT

Hello, my name is Claire Gill. I am a British artist exploring the landscape through contemporary photomontage. I create digital photomontages in Adobe Photoshop, which I exhibit and sell as limited edition fine art prints.

The Power of Landscape

I am drawn to the landscape because of its power to transform how we feel – to bring calm, balance, and clarity. Through my photomontages, I seek to create spaces of reflection. I invite the viewer to step into a landscape that is both real and imagined, and perhaps to find a sense of peace within it.

Photography as Connection

Photography enables me to see, explore, and connect with the world. Like many of us, I use my camera to record what draws my attention such as scenes I want to remember from day trips, walks, and holidays. Alongside wider views of the landscape, I am especially fascinated by weathered surfaces on boats, peeling paint in doorways, graffiti marks on walls, and other overlooked patterns in the environment. I find beauty in these incidental marks and often build them into my work as more abstract elements.

From Painting to Photography

Some years ago, I thought I would be a painter. I began assembling my photographs as digital collages to inspire paintings, but I fell in love with the process before I ever picked up a brush. Working digitally allows me to reimagine my photographs, cutting and layering them to build new visual landscapes. Each composition may contain over sixty separate layers, holding traces of the places that inspired them while also leaving room for imagination.

Process and Practice

I often work on several photomontages at once, letting each evolve in its own time. The process is slow, meditative, and intuitive—like solving a puzzle of how the pieces might fit together. I do not plan my images. As a neurodiverse person, planning has never come naturally; instead, my work emerges through an iterative rhythm of adding and subtracting until balance is found. The piece is finished at the moment nothing more is needed—when all elements are resolved and in harmony. The joy lies in discovery: finding out what the image will become.

ARTIST BIO

Claire currently lives in West Sussex.

She trained in knitted textile design at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design and then the Royal College of Art.

Follow my progress on instagram and in my blog

2025 Shortlisted for the VAA International Exhibition Scholarship

2024 Named as on of Artfinder’s Best Selling Artists

2022 One of 16 people identified as ‘One to Watch’ by Artfinder.com

2020 Claire’s work ‘Of the Sea’ becomes part of the Art Collection at Historic Dockyard Chatham

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I AM REPRESENTED BY THE FOLLOWING GALLERIES

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Southwold Gallery | Southwold | Suffolk

Cove Gallery | Weymouth | Dorset

Bircham Gallery | Holt | Norfolk

Byard Art Gallery | Cambridge

Henry Paddon Gallery | Eastbourne | East Sussex

Stark Gallery | Canterbury | Kent

Urbanista | Whitstable | Kent