Fine Art Photography School of Fine Art
Clare Flynn
RSA New Contemporaries Selected Artist 2026
My photographic practice is grounded in black and white, not for its nostalgia but rather its ability to shape, contrast, and trace the world. To slow down the look and provide room for what is felt rather than seen, I create abstractions to resist the immediate.
The Fabric of Everything (2025)
The Fabric of Everything
The Fabric of Everything
The Fabric of Everything
The Fabric of Everything
The Fabric of Everything
The Fabric of Everything is a meditation on impermanence, memory, and the unseen threads that bind us to the world and one another. Guided by experiences of grief and guilt I found myself grasping for continuity and peace within a space. I explored the expanse of seascape, the transient presence of birds in flight, and the quiet poetry of reflections in the spaces where one realm touches another. Reflections, especially, are central, not for what they show, but for what they distort, conceal, or suggest. In playing with perspective, I introduce the idea that reality is not fixed but shaped by the position of the observer, inviting the viewer to consider what reality is and how we participate in it.
A Windy Day (2025)
Documentation of the dangerous wind gusts on Ayr’s beachfront during Storm Éowyn’s red weather warning.
In January 2025, against better judgement and government red weather warnings, I ventured out into the midst of Storm Éowyn and began the windy descent to Ayr’s beach front. The beach – a place that had become my space of quiet, meditative thinking, had transformed into a treacherous landscape, overrun by jaggy white waves which invaded the sands below. With my camera grasped firmly in my hands I shot for mere minutes. The gusts of wind pulled out every last breath I had stored in my lungs and my hair and lips were coated in the sea’s salt. Looking up, a lone gull clung to the sky above me – my only companion. Not even the beastly sea birds dared come out this afternoon. It was time to leave.
Look (2024)
Look examines the psychological and emotional necessity to very briefly interact with grief, to recognise it, to feel its heat and to deliberately turn away in order to survive. Grief is a power so strong that prolonged exposure can consume an individual. In their abstraction, my photographs carry a sense of time slipping away conveying moments lost, escaped from – not fully faced.