Meet Claire Drummond, Winner of the 2025 Joseph Plaskett Award, at Art Toronto

The award recipient will display recent works at booth #A07 and will be present on Opening Night

I lay like a stone under water, 2024, Oil on canvas, 47.75″ x 71.75″. Photo: Marc Bider

Joe Plaskett Foundation Booth (#A07)
October 23 – 26, 2025
Opening Night: Thursday, October 23, 2025
Metro Toronto Convention Centre
255 Front Street West, Toronto

From October 23 to 26 at Art Toronto 2025, The Joe Plaskett Foundation is showcasing recent works from painter Claire Drummond, the 2025 recipient of the $65,000 Joseph Plaskett postgraduate award in painting. In her paintings, Drummond challenges 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.

The body of works shown at Art Toronto—The Waves—borrows its title and conceptual approach from Virginia Woolf’s lyrical novel, which envisions the self, consciousness and time as continually made and remade through metaphors of water and light. In these paintings, Claire Drummond explores the transformation of becoming a m(other) through the fluid and liminal space of the domestic bath.

Painter Claire Drummond in her studio. Photo: Natalie Goulet

The figures in The Waves are loosely based on Drummond’s own form, appearing multiple times within the same pictorial space: two, twelve, twenty-one, twenty-four times, and so on. This plurality of the self is a means of communicating the profound loss of singularity necessitated by becoming a m(other). The self is multiplied, dispersed, fragmented. The fluid lyricism of Woolf’s words—which are excerpted in the title of each work—in combination with the reflective surface of water and tile function as prisms that allow Drummond to explore the shifting physical and emotional states of becoming a m(other) through hue and luminosity.

Drummond was selected for the 2025 Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting earlier this year by a coast-coast jury formed by 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. This award will allow Drummond to spend time in Edinburgh, Scotland, to grow her artistic practice and reconnect with her Scottish heritage. While in Europe, she plans to visit London, Paris, Florence and the Vatican to deepen her understanding of the evolution of maternal visual history.

Body of time, 2025, Oil on canvas, 60″ x 72″. Photo: Marc Bider

About the Artist

Claire Drummond (b. 1993) is a painter and educator who recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing at NSCAD University. She previously completed an MA in Cultural Studies at McGill University. She is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting (2025), a Research and Creation grant from Canada Council for the Arts (2025), the Judith Jane Leidl Graduate Fellowship (2023) and the Scotia Scholar’s Award from Research Nova Scotia (2022-2023). She recently participated in solo exhibitions at Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre in Kingston, ON (2024) and Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, NS (2023), and will be mounting a forthcoming solo exhibition at Eltuek Arts Centre in Sydney, NS (2027). She has participated in group exhibitions at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL (2025), Gathering in London, UK (2024), Galerie Gardette in Paris, FR (2024), Art Mûr in Montreal, QC (2023) and Chester Art Centre in Chester, NS (2023). She will be featured in the Winter 2025 issue of Yolk Magazine and the juried publication of Volume 21 of Friend of the Artist.

About the Joe Plaskett Foundation

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. As the Joseph Plaskett Award is granted on a biennial basis, the next call for applications is set to open in February 2027.

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Image Descriptions:
1. Multiple versions of the same figure, inspired by the artist’s own form, are engaged in a ritual of transformation and rebirth. The repeated figures are organized around the still core of a central figure resting in a bath, around which colour and form whirl.
2. A photograph of painter Claire Drummond in her studio with two of her paintings behind her, her hands laying on her crossed legs as she sits and looks at the camera.
3. Around a monumental pregnant figure standing as a maypole, smaller figures weave a cocoon of colour, enmeshed in a dance of emergence and becoming.
4. The Joe Plaskett Foundation logo, with the red “Plaskett” signature.