Winner’s work showcased at the Joe Plaskett Foundation Booth during Art Toronto (October 23-26, 2025).
studio with Phoebe.
Photo credit: Natalie Goulet.
Painter Claire Drummond is the 2025 recipient of the $65,000 Joseph Plaskett postgraduate award in painting. Originally from Elgin, Quebec, she completed her Master of Fine Arts in 2023 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University.
In her paintings, Drummond aims to challenge the belief that art that focuses on maternity and domesticity is aesthetically inferior and politically inconsequential. Her current practice focuses on self-portraits that explore her embodiment as she contemplates becoming a parent, as well as portraits of artists/m(others), a term that includes queer and gender nonconforming folks who identify as being engaged in sustaining life. In her work, paint is handled in a deliberately hasty fashion; her incomplete and repeated figures reflect the fragmented and interrupted conditions of art-making demanded of parental caregivers.
The Plaskett Award jury found that a sense of community and connection emerges from Drummond’s works, along with a fearless commitment to a different kind of criticality. They also were impressed by the distinctive brushwork and colour palette, bringing a sense of intimacy and touch to the works, with her series The Waves—a painterly exploration of matrescence borrowing its title and conceptual approach from Virginia Woolf’s lyrical novel—especially standing out for its use of colour and composition. In some self-portraits, the combination of painting and drawing, with unfinished or repeated motifs, expanded the feeling of movement and the passage of time.
The award will allow Drummond to spend time in Edinburgh, Scotland, to grow her artistic practice and reconnect with the Scottish heritage of both her great-grandmothers, with the potential support of a residency at the Spilt Milk Gallery, one of the few social enterprises in the world that is dedicated to making m(other)hood visible. Once in Europe, Drummond will visit London, Paris, Florence and the Vatican to deepen her understanding of the evolution of maternal visual history, focusing on idealized icons of the Madonna, Charity, Niobe, and the Angel in the House spanning the 3rd to 19th centuries. These references, combined with archival imagery and Celtic mythology, will serve as a starting point for a new corpus of works subverting inherited narratives of maternal memory and mythology, in order to better represent the interdependence and vulnerability of contemporary human experience.
Claire Drummond’s work will be showcased at the Joe Plaskett Foundation Booth (#A07) during Art Toronto (October 23-26, 2025). A solo exhibition will follow in fall 2027 at the Eltuek Arts Centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia, focusing on a forthcoming body of work entitled The Artist as M(other).
The Plaskett Award recipient was chosen by a pan-Canadian jury who met virtually in June 2025 to carefully assess the 56 applications that were received. In an effort to accurately represent the variety of viewpoints in Canadian painting, the jury members came from different regions: Ufuk Ali Gueray, a visual artist and professor (NSCAD University) currently living in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Guillaume Lépine, a visual artist and professor (Université de Moncton) established in Moncton, New Brunswick; and Lisa Milroy, an artist and professor emerita (Slade School of Fine Art, University College London) originally from Vancouver and currently living and working in London and Lydd-on-Sea, United Kingdom, as well as Saint-Michel-de-Rivière, France.
As the Joseph Plaskett Award is granted on a biennial basis, the next call for applications is set to open in February 2027. Canadian artist Joseph Plaskett, who wished to give young Canadian painters the opportunity to discover Europe, created the Joe Plaskett Foundation in 2004. The award recipients are exceptional emerging Canadian artists in the field of painting who are admitted in a graduate program.
For more information:
info@joeplaskett.com