about

Artist statement

I work in forms that are inherently unresolved, relational, experimental, and alive.
A lot of what could be called “unfinished” are actually forms that resist closure.

My various projects orbit the same core investigations: clothing as language, attachment and rupture, repair that never fully restores, bodies negotiating impossible structures, participation instead of spectatorship, systems failing in revealing ways, improvisation as survival.
transformation through instability.

Across performances, garments, workshops, installations, and participatory situations, I am interested in gender, deterioration, tenderness mixed with collapse, and the emotional life of materials. I make structures that shift while people are inside them.

Performance disappears. Workshops happen once. Relationships change shape. Garments decay. Bodies age. Emotional understanding arrives partially. None of this produces the satisfying object capitalism teaches us to recognize as “done.” But ephemerality is not failure.

I research language for difficult experiences.
I build participatory structures.
I keep refining ideas.
I search for precision inside instability.
I investigate new forms.

I am drawn to unstable systems, failed alignments, garments that cannot quite resolve, and forms of attachment that persist after structure breaks down.

unfinishedness feels personal to me. I am studying it from the inside.

But unfinished is not the same as meaningless.

— Curious Orange

Bio

Claire Fleury / Curious Orange
Amsterdam/New York

Claire Fleury – Curious Orange is a costume designer and performance maker with a background in movement and theatre. They develop costumes as active components of performance, treating clothing as protagonists rather than decorative elements. Fleury explores the relationship between the human body in motion, material, and environment, with particular attention to tensions between desire and ecological responsibility. The work evolves through research processes where construction and decay intersect.
Their practice honors the rituals and identities in dressing, moving between performance, installation, and capsule collections.

Drawing from their background in theatre and dance, C continues to work on creating their alternative to fashion shows in the form of dance, music and spoken word performances. They have created such performances in NYC at Moonpalace, at Dixon Place and at Judson Church for Movement Research, in Brussels at Tic Tac Art Centre and at La Encartada Moda in Bilbao, Spain.

She has created dance costumes for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, judith sanchéz-Ruíz, david zambrano, yoshiko chuma, kathy westwater and many others. 

C is currently teaching workshops focused on Garments in movement. She teaches these workshops in New York at Movement Research, Part of a series of workshops at The woods, in Brussels at Tic Tac Art Centre, and in Berlin at B12 and Tanzfabrik.

C has been teaching garment construction at Kentucky College of Art and Design, upcycling workshops for teens at the Dorril Initiative and at demolición, brooklyn.

They were a 2025 artist in residence at LMCC on Governors Island, New York City.