CLARE SMITH lives and works in Dover where she co-founded Dover Arts Development with Joanna Jones in 2006.

Her mixed English/Chinese heritage informs her perspective on issues of identity and categorisation. Frequent travelling as a child and young adult mean she has a somewhat ambivalent relationship to place, reinforced by the sense of ambiguity that comes from her mixed identity. She works with drawing, print media, collage and moving image to investigate this ambivalence and what it feels like to actually be in a place, with references to craft, the importance of labour and the handmade. Through her choice of materials and approaches, she creates work which attempts to create a sense of unity, an interpretation of Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space” – seen as a space in which different parts can come together to challenge dominant ideas of wholeness.

Smith runs a shared studio space for 7 artists called the Dover Studio Collective which hosts an annual Printfest and Open Studios.

She was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019.