Claire Bunklell

Claire Bunkell was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1974.

After graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1995 with a Bachelor of Art in English Literature and Economics, she moved to London and began a career in corporate life. During this time, Claire travelled to Asia, Europe and Central America, developing a strong interest in photography.

She returned to Cape Town in 2003. She married and, at the age of 30, after the birth of her first child, decided to pursue a more creative path and enrolled at the Ruth Prowse School of Art.

Claire spent a year in the chemical darkroom and a further two years using the emerging digital darkroom before obtaining her diploma in fine art photography in 2008. In the years that followed, Claire worked as both a freelance and fine art photographer.

As a photographer, she specializes in landscape, still life and architectural photography.

Claire's final year at Ruth Prowse was devoted to creating a series of 12 images for an exhibition. These images explored the relationship between humans and the environment in the context of idealism. By using various photographic techniques such as blurring, overexposure, low resolution and noise, Claire sought to photograph everyday spaces with a dreamlike quality, to eventually print them on plexiglass and exhibit them.

Her landscape photography, with its high-key filtered tones and textured resolution, is about creating photographic images that have the quality of a painting rather than the raw realism of a documentary. Desiring to evolve herself, Claire decided to portray these artistic explorations on canvas and has now moved on to painting her photographic work.

Integrity and form are the defining values ​​in her work; as a conceptual artist, Claire strives to capture movement and life in an honest way.

She currently lives in Cape Town with her husband, two sons, a Siberian Forest Cat and an Aussie Sheepdog.