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Claire Heise’s paintings are her response to living in a make-me-over obsessed culture where the attainment of an idealised perfect and permanent state of happiness is promoted as our most prized goal. A culture in which normal human vulnerabilities such as sadness, anxiety and anger, as deviations from this idealised happiness, seem to be more and more associated with shame, weakness and failure. Through Claire’s practice she tries to create paintings that will challenge reductive and popularistic ideals of human mental health, happiness and experience.