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2024 ACTIVE MEMBERS
2023 ACTIVE MEMBERS
GALLERY CLIMATE COALITION ACTIVE MEMBERSHIP
Claire Milner has again been awarded Active Membership of the Gallery Climate Coalition, for the year of 2024 (announced May 2025).
She was initially one of fewer than ten artists worldwide who were selected for the inaugural Active Membership in 2022 and again in 2023 along with several Blue Chip galleries, institutions and museums who have demonstrated that their organisation has implemented environmental sustainability best practice. The Gallery Climate Coalition is an international community of arts organisations working to reduce the sector’s environmental impacts, and Claire Milner has been a member since March 2021, shortly after its inception. The goal of the GCC is to facilitate a greener and more sustainable commercial art world. The aim is to provide guidelines and the necessary resources to collectively reduce the sector’s carbon footprint by 50% over the next ten years - in line with the Paris Agreement, and to promote near zero-waste practices. Learn more about GCC here: www.galleryclimatecoalition.org
ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY STATEMENT
Climate change, ocean pollution, habitat loss and the current rapid rate of extinction have devastating implications as the biggest challenges we face. We must act with urgency to resolve these critical concerns, as our planet is fast approaching irreversible tipping points. Biodiversity forms the web of life that we depend on, it is essential to the healthy functioning of ecosystems around the world and is the result of 4.5 billion years of evolution. Over half of global GDP is dependent on nature, but nature is in crisis. The main driver of biodiversity loss is human activity and climate change is an increasingly important factor which depends on biodiversity as part of the solution, so the two are interlinked. Read the full statement
UPCOMING:
GARDENERS OF EDEN. SOLO SHOW AT NOON POWELL FINE ART
17 SEPTEMBER - 4 OCTOBER 2026
Life emerges, vanishes, transforms – Claire Milner paints the world in flux.
GARDENERS OF EDEN
Claire Milner is emerging as a distinctive voice in contemporary art, recognised for work that is both visually compelling and conceptually urgent. Her practice engages with one of the defining challenges of our time - the impact of human activity on the natural world - through paintings that are contemplative, immersive, and emotionally resonant. This September, her latest body of work, Gardeners of Eden, will be presented in a solo exhibition at Noon Powell Fine Art in Richmond, London.
At the core of the exhibition lies a fundamental question: what sustains life, and what happens when those delicate systems begin to disappear? Milner explores this through layered, shifting landscapes where abstraction and figuration coexist. Forms emerge and dissolve; creatures flicker into view only to recede into their surroundings. These works evoke ecosystems in flux, suspended between abundance and loss, carrying a sense of deep time while reflecting the urgent pressures of the present. Subtle echoes of art history appear in imagined, jungle-like environments that recall earlier visions of nature, now reconfigured into something more unsettled and contemporary.
BURNING WORLD
Her paintings resist resolution; instead, they ask to be revisited, allowing meaning to surface slowly, in fragments, inviting a slower, more attentive gaze, where the viewer becomes an active participant. In Burning World, a sense of instability is especially palpable, while A Fifty-Million-Year-Old Smile suggests an ancient continuity, a trace of life that has endured across millennia yet feels increasingly precarious. The titular painting, Gardeners of Eden, centres on elephants as both majestic beings and vital ecological architects. As a keystone species, they sustain entire environments, shaping habitats upon which countless other species depend. Milner portrays them in a state of quiet tension, powerful yet vulnerable, implying that their loss would trigger far wider ecological consequences. This interplay between strength and fragility runs throughout the exhibition, reflecting broader concerns around biodiversity loss and climate change.
A FIFTY-MILLION-YEAR-OLD SMILE
Materially, Milner’s work is inseparable from its message. Using natural pigments, she constructs her surfaces from the same elements that form the landscapes she seeks to protect. These mineral-rich substances carry the weight of geological time, embedding each painting with a tangible connection to the earth and reinforcing the link between medium and meaning.
Her growing international presence reflects the strength of this approach. From exhibiting in the Blue Zone at COP26 to museum shows and major commissions - including a large-scale portrait of Marilyn Monroe for Rihanna - Milner’s practice moves fluidly across contexts while remaining grounded in its central concerns. Beyond the canvas, her commitment extends into action, forging a direct link between image and impact: proceeds from her work support environmental organisations, and her involvement with the Gallery Climate Coalition underscores an ongoing dedication to sustainable practice.
Ultimately, Milner proposes art as a site of encounter, inseparable from the world it reflects, a space where environmental crises can be felt as much as understood. Gardeners of Eden is both personal and universal, inviting reflection on not only what is being lost, but what might still be protected.
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