
Credit: Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Strike a Pose, Claire Moore, 2021
Artists in Residence
Artists connecting neighbors through creativity.
Join us to explore your artistic side at Clayton Community Centre and connect with your neighbors through creative group projects.
Clayton Community Artist in Residence Program
This studio-based residency invites artists to the Clayton Heights neighborhood to meet local folks and lead projects that bring them together. It supports artists to push their art-making boundaries and practice new ways of including others.
This is also an opportunity for residents to tap into a network of other community-minded people, learn different forms of self-expression, and contribute to creative projects that reinforce social cohesion.
Current Residency

Feel at Home with Keely
Keely O'Brien is an interdisciplinary, community engaged artist. Her work responds to the uniqueness of each new place she encounters. With community members, she explores the nuances of space, home, and belonging. Her projects celebrate the creativity of all participants.
In 2023, Keely, along with the community of Clayton, will ask: how can a community centre feel like home?
Keely will be providing programs that focus on belonging, agency, and connection:
- Learn about your neighbours through library book recommendations
- Create a beautiful heirloom that expresses your family history
- Watch Clayton youth take over the lobby with an exciting art installation.
- Increase your sense of well-being through art and movement in a yoga and art class.
Through these projects, Keely and community participants will come together through creativity.
Past Residencies

Learn about Bees with Jen
Jen Clark is a local artist whose paintings explore how humans see the natural world. Her painting style is both abstract and realistic. She specializes in large-scale murals, including projects with the Vancouver Mural Festival.
Jen worked with the summer arts camp kids to create The Beekeepers' Mural at Clayton Community Centre. Each camper participated in a field trip to a local hive, where they met a beekeeper from the Honeybee Centre. Campers saw how the hive works and learned the importance of healthy bee communities. Afterwards, campers painted a hexagon tile that became part of the final honeycomb pattern mural. View the final project to see what is buzzing.

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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Jen Clark, The Beekeepers Mural, 2022. Photo of the mural, which depicts abstract and photo-realistic flowers and bees.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Jen Clark, The Beekeepers Mural, 2022. Detail photo of the mural, showing the centre portion.
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Photo by City of Surrey staff, Jen Clark, The Beekeepers Mural, 2022. Photo of a crowd of people in front of the mural, celebrating its opening.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Jen Clark, The Beekeepers Mural, 2022. Detail photo of the mural, showing honeycomb pieces painted by children.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Jen Clark, The Beekeepers Mural, 2022. Photo looking over the shoulders of two young people standing in front of the mural.”
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Jen Clark, The Beekeepers Mural, 2022. Detail photo of the mural, showing flowers.

Play with Tamara
Tamara Unroe is a maker, a puppeteer, and a committed dumpster diver. She studied visual art at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and puppetry with Sandglass Theatre in Vermont. She has worked with artists and communities in Canada, Taiwan, Europe, and Thailand. Tamara builds large- scale puppets, shadow puppets, costumes, and sculptural installations, often incorporating found objects and sound.
In spring of 2022, community members joined Tamara to play with puppets, light, and sound. Check out the completed video projects below!

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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Tamara Unroe, Shadowing in Place, 2022. Photo looking over the shoulders of two young children sitting on the floor watching a black-and-white video projection.”
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Tamara Unroe, Shadowing in Place, 2022. Photo looking over the shoulders of two young children sitting on the floor watching a black-and-white video projection.”

Strike a Pose with Claire Moore
Claire Moore is a multi-media artist who lives and works near Crescent Beach. Her art practice ranges from small-scale sculptural interventions to large format oil paintings and her process is often collaborative.
Claire has collected poses from the Clayton Heights community—poses that reflect people's experience of the past year. Claire's drawings explore the many ways people have been impacted by the pandemic and how we hold these memories in our bodies. The collection of drawings, entitled Strike a Pose, is on display at Clayton Community Centre.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Strike a Pose, Claire Moore, 2021. Image of a long gallery wall with life-drawing images hung on it and two people walking towards the camera, looking at the drawings.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Strike a Pose, Claire Moore, 2021. Image of a long gallery wall with life-drawing images hung on it.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: Strike a Pose, Claire Moore, 2021. Image over the shoulder of a person in a red coat, looking at a wall of life drawings.

Tell Your Story with Jude
Jude Campbell is a Surrey-based artist who collects found objects and personal historical artifacts. She reconfigures these into multimedia installations to give voice to personal and community stories.
After meeting with local residents to listen to their stories, Jude used the text from these stories to create a hanging sculpture entitled COVID Reflections that hangs in Clayton Community Centre.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: COVID Reflections, Jude Campbell, 2021. Image of a hanging sculpture made from acetate sheets rolled into cones and hung in spirals, painted in shades of blue with words stenciled on.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: COVID Reflections, Jude Campbell, 2021. Image of a hanging sculpture made from acetate sheets rolled into cones and hung in spirals, painted in shades of blue with words stenciled on. Photo from underneath the sculpture looking straight up at it.
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Photo by Brian Giebelhaus: COVID Reflections, Jude Campbell, 2021. Image of a hanging sculpture made from acetate sheets rolled into cones and hung in spirals, painted in shades of blue with words stenciled on. This image shows the sculpture from far away, with a large spiral staircase in the background.
Contact
Email communityart@surrey.ca if you require any accommodations to participate.