Over the past two decades, Claire Lambe has engaged the material and transformative possibilities of sculpture – and more recently the relationships between object/form and image/photograph – to unsettle conventional notions around gender and class. Her work particularly draws upon personal histories in relation to the sexual promiscuity and violence associated with the experimental art, music and club scenes of late 1970s Northern England and often draws our attention to the ways in which power might be signified through popular culture. Trained as a sculptor, and known for her strange and often abject sculptural forms, Lambe’s work engages the female body to address underlying histories of sexuality, violence and social discontent. She is interested in focusing attention on individual artefacts and sculptural objects and their cultural and social meanings; thus revealing the dichotomy by which one might be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by objects – specifically objects which extend her own interest in pleasure, violence, ritual, and commodity culture.
Claire Lambe completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Bristol College of Art in 1985, followed by postgraduate studies at the University of New South Wales in 1990 and a Master of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 1995. Recent exhibitions include: Miss Universal (with Atlanta Eke), Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2015; Strangefellows (with Lisa Young) West Space, Melbourne, 2013; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013–14; Like Mike, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, 2013; Lazyboy, Sarah Scout, Melbourne, 2012; Beadlestaff, Switchback Gallery presented by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2011; Ertographomania, CAST Gallery, Hobart, 2010; and Yakety Sax (with Lou Hubbard) Sarah Scout, 2011. Lambe was co-founder, with Elvis Richardson, of Death Be Kind, an artist-run project that ran for two years from 2010 in Brunwsick, Melbourne, and undertook a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary from 2014–2016.