Clara Schmitt
Figurative Sculptress
Work
Bio
Clara Schmitt is a French-American sculptor based in Seattle, WA, working in contemporary figurative sculpture. Born and raised in Paris, France, she began her professional career in academia as a social science researcher before transitioning to sculpture. She relocated to Seattle and started training at the Magrath Sculpture Atelier at Gage Academy of Art. She graduated in 2025. She currently teaches sculpture classes and workshops at Gage and serves as a teaching assistant in the Magrath Sculpture Atelier.
Her training focused on modeling the human form from life. One of her early works, Penelope, was a finalist in two international competitions in 2024: the 33PA Emerging Artist Award by Beautiful Bizarre Art Magazine and the 17th International ARC Salon Competition hosted by the Art Renewal Center.
She has developed a body of work grounded in direct observation and extended through processes of fragmentation and reassembly. Working from life, she constructs figures from multiple sculpted elements, moving away from singular, unified poses toward more complex, composite forms.
Artist Statement
My sculptural work begins with modeling figures or parts of figures in clay. I work exclusively from live physical models rather than imagined or invented bodies, establishing a concrete source that anchors the work even as it moves toward abstraction. By taking molds of my observational work, these realistically rendered figures can be repeated, fragmented and recombined. The work develops through accumulation: fragments of the same model are multiplied, layered, and assembled within a single piece. In some works, fragments derive from multiple poses of the same model; in others, they derive from single pose, allowing each work to establish its own internal logic.
Accumulation is central to the work, shaping how fragments are repeated and assembled within each piece. Fragmentation functions as a sculptural language that makes repetition possible without saturating the visual field. Because the fragments retain careful observational modeling, their reassembly exposes planar relationships and abstract volumes alongside anatomical specificity. Abstraction emerges as a consequence rather than as a stylistic aim, and the work moves between figuration and abstraction without settling into a single reading.
The work resists the reduction of a person to a single, coherent body. Unity is not rejected outright, but displaced, with the body understood as a site of accumulation rather than a fixed entity. Through these procedural constraints, the pieces sustain complexity, allowing multiple presences to coexist within an single sculptural form.