Artist's Statement

Claire Millett Lima is a mixed media sculpture artist who was raised in the coastal town of Newport, Oregon. As a child, she often spent her days foraging for moss and flowers with her mother, a craft artist, secretly using the “good paints’ in her fathers art studio, and rummaging around her fathers fishing gear shed for treasures to incorporate into her various art projects. This process forged deep connections to her numerous stomping grounds, as if she was an integral part of those tiny ecosystems rather than an observer. 

She continues this process in her sculptures today, utilizing what is immediately around her and often overlooked, the gathering of and relationship to the territory and each collected element as important as the vision and assemblage. The experience of combining these elements is multi sensory, an earthy scent is released as dried leaves are crushed, twigs are snapped, materials are mixed by hand. The sculpture that emerges is a beautifully distorted map of her contact with the terrain and an examination of the human dimensions of place attachment.