Mia Clayton is an Australian photographic artist currently based in Paris. Her practice explores the intersections of landscape, memory, and analogue experimentation.
Clayton’s photographs use the natural world as a vessel for storytelling, accompanied by themes of nostalgia, disintegration and time. The reclaiming of analogue processes and allow audiences to re-centre their minds on the tangible in the mundanity of the everyday digitally saturated world. Clayton invites the landscape into conversation with the image to collect an imprint of place. Her work is inherently process-based and is much about what happens to an image’s material surface as it is about the original visual depiction. Mia is also interested in finding ways to take the photographic print off the wall - whether through video, fabric installation or camera-less techniques.
Mia is currently completing her MFA in Photography and Image Making at Paris College of Art, and holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Photography) at Queensland College of Art. She held her debut solo show at Land Street Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, Fleeting and Forever in October, 2025. Additionally, her work has been exhibited in group shows across Australia and internationally including The Thread That Pulls (National Galleries Scotland, 2025), She, The Burren (Ireland, 2025) and RE:Trace (Brisbane, 2024). In 2024, she was named a semi-finalist for the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize.
@llenafinkenzeller
awards and recognitions.
-
‘Fleeting’
‘Boom or Bust’
‘Collapse’
Visual Arts Scotland - National Galleries Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh
-
‘Messy’ SOLD
Visual Arts Scotland - National Galleries Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh
-
A one month residency at the Burren College of Art in Co. Clare, Ireland.
-
Semi-finalist.
-
Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Creative Generation, Brisbane.
the analogue.
In a digitally saturated world, tangibly and materiality become increasingly important in the photographic space.
To the artist, a digital photograph can lose materiality and significance.
Mia works exclusively with film, both black and white and colour, shooting on medium format and 35mm film cameras.
Post-development, she often works in the darkroom to produce one of a kind silver gelatine prints, and experiments with film development techniques to produce to chemically altered images.
Clayton also works with double exposure techniques in-camera.
