Claire Anderson

Pins and Needles resonates strongly with the exhibition's exploration of plasticity through its engagement with transformation, bodily response, and the negotiation of trauma. Created as part of a series reflecting on Claire's experiences of domestic abuse, the work emerged from a deeply cathartic process of reframing what it means to be triggered or activated. While rooted in personal experience, the piece speaks to broader experiences of vulnerability, survival, and healing.

Composed of hundreds of suspended needles, the installation creates a palpable sense of precarity and tension. The work carries an undercurrent of anxiety while simultaneously drawing viewers in through its beauty and alluring material presence. This push and pull between attraction and discomfort reflects the body's own adaptive responses to pressure and threat. Rather than positioning these responses as signs of damage, Pins and Needles acknowledges them as protective mechanisms, evidence of the body's capacity to reorganize itself in response to lived experience. Through this reframing, the work becomes a meditation on transformation, resilience, and acceptance.

Not For You explores questions of agency and bodily autonomy at a time when both remain increasingly contested. The pillow, a recurring motif in Claire's practice, functions as a symbol of softness, vulnerability, comfort, and safety. Through material intervention, however, these associations are complicated and destabilized. The work examines how objects and bodies become sites of negotiation, projection, and control, reflecting the ways personal autonomy is continually shaped by external social and political forces. In dialogue with the theme of Plasticity, Not For You considers how vulnerability and resistance coexist, and how individuals navigate systems that seek to define, regulate, or transform them.