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Clare Samuel / Malcolm

Video still from They live on in the hair of their children from Malcolm, single channel video with sound, 18min loop, 2023.
Image: Clare Samuel, Video still from ‘They live on in the hair of their children’ from ‘Malcolm’, single channel video with sound, 18min loop, 2023.

Clare Samuel / Malcolm
November 7 – December 12, 2025
PAVED Arts, 424 20th St. W. Saskatoon

Opening reception: Friday, November 7,  7 pm
Framing the Family: Photo-based Workshop w/ Clare Samuel: Saturday, November 8, 1–4 pm

Clare Samuel’s exhibition at PAVED Arts, ‘Malcolm’, navigates the terrain of memory, mental health, and environmental precarity through an expanded photographic practice. Merging still and moving images with sculpture and installation, Samuel interrogates portraiture’s limits in capturing the complexities of her late father — a schizophrenic ecologist whose apocalyptic fears and dark humour shaped their fraught bond. The project interweaves lumen photograms, medical documents, and self-portraits to evoke Malcolm’s obsessive environmentalism, his belief in space colonization, and his turbulent parenting amid 1980s Northern Ireland’s societal divides. Samuel juxtaposes personal grief with collective climate dread, probing parallels between psychiatric diagnoses and shifting cultural perceptions of “madness.” Her layered approach mirrors the instability of inherited trauma and institutional failures, while reclaiming narratives through the Consumer/Survivor movement’s lens. By blending archival ephemera with speculative imagery, *Malcolm* constructs a non-linear cosmology—a meditation on how intimacy and estrangement coexist in familial and ecological collapse. The work challenges fixed notions of identity, inviting viewers to dwell in the unresolved tensions between care, neglect, and the impossibility of fully knowing another.

Shell I from Malcolm, dimensions variable (e.g.18x27in c-print) 2022.
Clare Samuel, ‘Shell I’ from ‘Malcolm’, dimensions variable (e.g.18x27in c-print) 2022.
Clare Samuel, Shell II from Malcolm, dimensions variable, 2022.
Clare Samuel, ‘Shell II’ from ‘Malcolm’, dimensions variable (e.g. 30x40in lightbox) 2022.
Clare Samuel

Artist Bio

Clare Samuel is a visual artist originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BFA from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work focuses on connection and distances between the self and other, as well as notions of social division, borders, and belonging. Spanning mediums such as photography, video, text and installation, her projects are often a dialogue with the idea of portraiture. She has exhibited internationally including recently at OBORO, Belfast Exposed, VU Photo, Gallery TPW. Clare’s practice has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. She is co-founder and co-director of Feminist Photography Network, a nexus for research on the relationship between feminism and lens-based media.

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