Claire Bloomfield is a contemporary artist originally from Nashville, TN. She received her BFA in Photography and Media from UT Chattanooga in 2014. Most of Claire’s work is inspired by studio extensions and hands-on exploration. Using the scanner bed to cultivate paintings, she plays with paradoxes around holy and toxic natures. She came up with this idea after spending time at an internship in India and volunteering at Sundog Ecovillage in Montana. She was inspired by the modern food culture and ritualistic practices of the East. Her studio studies continued to deepen as a greenhouse orchid caretaker 2015 and a cave guide explorer in 2016. She was featured in Chattanooga Pulse’s, State of the Arts Issue, as an up and coming artist of 2016 and has won various awards. Claire is a curator and founding member of Shapeshifter, A Moving Contemporary Gallery based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She has participated in several public lectures including a process and materials talk at Swine Gallery, AVA, and a public lecture at the Hunter Museum of American Art discussing “Making Opportunity” and “Examinations.” Claire currently serves as curator and videographer for Mineral House Media, a curatorial collective focused on the enrichment of personal practice through connection, analysis, and the elevation of working contemporary artists.

Claire Bloomfield, a new media artist originally from Nashville TN and curator with Mineral House Media, uses alternative photography methods to create painterly tantalizing works of art. She is interested in creating a more tactile way of viewing photography. Her process starts by using a scanner’s bed as a large format camera and canvas. On the glass, she paints personal dogmas with loose pigments and various materials giving herself one rule: to combine one natural and one artificial material. She is interested in exploring the elements of water, air, metal, wood, and fire and finding various ways to pair them with artifice. She strives to create a balance between paradoxical natures, in order to produce a sense of allure entangled with the grotesque.

As each photograph is cultivated, the copier’s light ejects across the scanner’s glass developing onto the computer. Its replica contains an aura and an inversion of perspective, as it is developed from an underlying viewpoint. Thus, capturing an image unseen by the human eye. Leaping into the void, she digs for an image like an archaeologist. Later on photoshop, she crops images using the “zoom” tool, pursuing the void of photography into the individual pixel. Her process is playful, and she views her work as having a specific alchemic secular techno-ritualistic process, that gives the viewer a glimpse into Singularity as holy.