About

Claire Ellis is a Canadian–Australian self-taught ceramic artist based in Coburg North, Naarm. Shaped by her former career as a chef and her experience living and working across two settler colonies, her practice is grounded in experimentation, material inquiry, and an ethic of care, alongside a critical engagement with politics, and processes of change.

Working with local by-products and waste streams derived from mined materials, Ellis engages ceramics as a way to attend to and revalue what is typically discarded or overlooked. Her work investigates supply chains and systems change, with a focus on seeking to process and make visible the social, environmental, and often obscured economic damage caused by the mining industry in Australia.

Ellis has exhibited her work locally and internationally. Following a nomination for a seven week artist residency in China’s ceramic capital, Jingdezhen, in 2024 she completed her first international solo exhibition.

Ellis won the innovation award at the Warrandyte Pottery Expo and was a finalist in the Churchie, Girra, Woollahra, Omnia, Wyndham, Little Things, Remagine and Northern Beaches Art Prizes. Her work has been published in magazines, journals and books and she has been an invited guest speaker at several events including The Australian Ceramics Triennale in 2022, the Robin Boyd Foundation in 2023, Melbourne Town Hall in 2024 and was a guest lecturer at the Australian National University and the Slovak Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2025.