Claudia Gutierrez is an artist, culture worker and arts advocate whose practice has been deeply informed by residencies in Canada and Mexico. She has been exhibiting her work in Ontario and Quebec, Canada since 2010 and has completed numerous public art and cultural outreach projects in Ottawa. She was awarded the SAW Prize for New Works in 2020 (Ottawa) and the Juror’s Choice Award at DesignTO in 2021 (Toronto); her work is supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa and Canadian Heritage.
Claudia’s multidisciplinary practice has in recent years engaged with textiles, utilizing her training in embroidery, hand dying and sewing. She imbues a sense of methodical mark making, repetitive and meditative contrasting her process which is often reliant on chance and improvisation.
By applying the pathos of her medium- using wool, cotton and linen to offer a sensory experience that contrast her bold compositions, Claudia’s work explores embroidery as a tool for abstraction to create a code switch in the role of her materials and her art form. Her pieces have been described as large illustrious blankets that embrace you as quickly as they push you backward to a space of rigid objecthood. These shifts in the role and meaning of her work act as representations of the movement between known and unknown, oddity and banality, fine art and craft, masculine and feminine until what is left is a new form entirely – a form born from the labour of those shifts. New forms tethered by past follies, ritual, communion, heritage, and memory.
MEDIA
Ottawa Citizen 2021 :: Breakthrough Ottawa artist Claudia Gutierrez mounts her first solo show at Studio Sixty Six - by Lynn Saxberg
BUST Magazine 2021 :: Artist Claudia Gutierrez On Color, Textiles, And The Importance of Art - by Beka Shane Denter
Globe & Mail Style Advisor Magazine 2023 :: Thread Work - by Odessa Parker
Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa for their funding support.
