Claire Halpin is a socially engaged mid-career Dublin artist who has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally including recent curated shows in Barcelona, The Hague, Sweden, Georgia, US and UK. A major solo museum exhibition is planned for 2027 in Florence, Italy.

Claire creates ambitious, complex, political narrative landscape paintings and installations which explore concepts around contested territories and geopolitical histories The current series of paintings are responding to sites of conflict and protest – from wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Middle East to the rise of the far-right populism as well as the ongoing forgotten wars away from the media lens. The spectacle and theatrics of the contemporary theatre of war recorded through paint. – contemporary, urgent and simultaneously historical.

In this exhibition, Claire uses historic tea crates as substrate for a series of new paintings responding to the social history of of transit, slave labour, trade route, colonial ecology, blood minerals and post-colonial mapping. Opened out, deconstructed, exposed, unfolded crates, free standing within the exhibition space as outposts – with each paintings focusing on the colonial legacy of the tea plantations, trade and industrialisation in Sri Lanka (former Ceylon), India, Ireland and Rwanda.

The artist explores the impact of Empire and its troubled legacy in post-colonial ongoing conflicts, civil wars and modern-day slavery. A history mapped, documented in traditional forms and materials of painted panel in a form that references Medieval panel paintings and Claire’s training as an icon writer.

Empirical Outposts is Claire Halpin’s first solo exhibition at Hillsboro Fine Art.