Claire Hickey is a visual artist who makes self-responsive sculptural objects, installations and multiples. Beginning with her hands, matter is physically manipulated, fingerprinted and shaped by her body and its experiences. This act of making captures a personal moment in time and gestures towards the performative. She uses materials intuitively, working with moulding and casting techniques in clay, wax, concrete and plaster. Somatic, familiar and functional, they reflect the tensions and flux of the female condition. Her current practice uses brick stacks, embedded casts and moulds to examine notions of pregnancy, labour, women’s work, and the dichotomy of being both an artist and mother.

Through collaborative projects and live-art making, she creates site-responsive pieces in the public realm that investigate manual working and the haptic history of place. She is a co-founder of Make/Shift/Space, a portable artist structure which hosts a temporary programme of residencies, workshops and events within public locations.