Marie-Claire Hamon

Marie-Claire Hamon is a Swiss-born artist living and working in Cornwall. She graduated from Falmouth in 1999 and has since developed a distinctive and quietly powerful body of work that has gained national attention.

Her career began to receive wider recognition in 2002 when her work was shortlisted for the Hunting Prize at the Royal College. Since then, she has exhibited extensively across Cornwall, London, and throughout the UK. Between 2004 and 2011, she was a regular exhibitor at both the Cadogan Gallery in London and the Campden Gallery.

In 2013, Hamon took part in an exhibition in the Dark Rooms at CAST in Helston, marking the transformation of the former school building into an arts venue. A year later, she joined the TAap artists' collective and contributed work to a residency in Studio 5 at the historic Porthmeor Studios in St Ives.

In 2015, her work was twice selected for screening on the large screen at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This was followed in 2016 by her participation in On St Michael’s Way, a group exhibition at the 12-Star Gallery at the European Centre for Culture in London. The show, which explored the shared heritage between Cornwall’s Saints’ Way and other pilgrimage routes across Europe, later toured to Tremenheere in Penzance.

Hamon presented a solo exhibition, We Want to Keep Dreaming, at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in 2018. The exhibition's central painting was later included in Let’s Talk About the Anthropocene at the University of Brighton.

Her work continued to garner critical recognition, with Forest Gold shortlisted for the Wells Contemporary Art Prize in 2020, and The Man Who Exchanged His Briefcase for a Fox selected for the Discerning Eye Prize in London in 2021. That same year, The Insect Collector and The Botanist were chosen for the Newlyn Society of Artists’ 125th anniversary exhibition, curated by Lisa Wright at the Tremenheere Sculpture Park Gallery.

In 2023, Hamon exhibited a new solo show, All Life Comes from the Mountain, in the Borlase Smart Room at Porthmeor Studios. The body of work was created during a two-year residency at Treveglos Studio in Zennor and reflects a deep engagement with the area’s ecology, history, and cultural layers.

She currently works from Boswednan Studio, a rural space on the edge of Penzance. In November 2025, she will present new work in the lower gallery at Newlyn Art Gallery/The Exchange.

Alongside her studio practice, Hamon has contributed to arts education as a visiting lecturer at various colleges and at Falmouth University. She is also a mentor at the Newlyn School of Art.

In 2010, art critic Nicolas Usherwood described her work as “quietly unassuming but intensely poetic… based very firmly on feeling, a feeling which, in its always unmistakable sense of human presence and unseen activity, takes on a powerful, and in this particular context, a very brave sense of the contemporary moment also.”