MOTHEROTHER

As part of the MOTHEROTHER relaunch event, we toured the speaker's work, including artist Claire Ong’s work ‘you will be cancelled’, part of @middlesbroughartweek on display at @theauxiliaryprojectspace.

@claire_o_studio is an award-winning Irish artist, living and working in Newcastle upon Tyne. She explores human language through multiple techniques and materials, primarily textiles, using screen printing, stitching, and repurposed textiles.

We learned about Claire’s process and materials, and how her work re-examines political statements when they are made permanent and context is removed. She presents a modern narrative in a traditionally female medium, playing with repetition, innuendo, and layered meanings, and crossing the boundaries between graffiti and fine textiles. We were also incredibly lucky to be joined by MEP @lynnboylansf, who, a year ago, gave a speech that resonated with Claire that she moved to create a piece based on her words.

Claire was awarded the inaugural Newlight Summer Art Textiles Bursary Award for State of the Nation, a substantial piece examining the caustic language and promises around the 2024 general election, and is a 2026/7 winner of Seaton Delaval Hall’s North East Emerging Artist Award, presenting Uneasy Chairs, a work shaped by the hall’s history as a World War II overspill prisoner-of-war camp. Ong has exhibited widely, including at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; the Newlight Art Prize exhibition, Sunnybank Mill; the National Gallery of Scotland; and the House of Smalls, Edinburgh.