Sex trafficking, child asylum seekers and detainees transferred to foreign countries for interrogation. These human rights issues are the focus of Golders Green artist Clare Walter’s work Triptych, which has been selected for the shortlist of Aesthetica art magazine’s art prize from more than 3,000 entries from around the world, and which is currently being exhibited in an international art show in York.

The Middlesex University MA Fine Art student earned her place on the shortlist of eight with a set of three innovative and striking pieces which map the routes taken by women and children trafficked for commercial sex exploitation, children seeking asylum on their own and flights conducted by the CIA in the process of extraordinary rendition.

“I heard I’d been longlisted around Christmas time,” says Clare, a mature student at the university in Hendon, “and then that I’d made the shortlist in the New Year – so it was an especially happy festive season for me!”

Clare entered both the award’s main and student categories and was delighted to learn she’d made it through in the main category.

“It took me a long time to digest,” she laughs. “I went to the private viewing at the beginning of March and saw that it really got people talking – so it’s achieved what I wanted it to.”

Clare is relatively new to the art world, having enrolled on the fine art course at Middlesex after a “life spent gathering experience which is now going into my artwork.” She has degrees in law and refugee studies and, having been interested in human rights since she was a child and being involved in human rights activism since her teens, has volunteered for a year for a British NGO in Cairo that provides legal representation for refugees there.

“I was on a flight to I don’t remember where,” recounts Clare, “and I was looking at the route maps in the inflight magazines and it came to me that I could link maps, which I love, to human rights, which I’ve always been involved in.”

Clare then embarked on a round of intensive research to narrow the whole subject of human rights down to just three, to fit the idea of a triptych, or set of three panels to be displayed side by side, that she had decided to present the artwork in.

“All the maps I’ve produced are based on the data published by human rights organisations,” explains Clare. “For Trafficking, the picture on display in York, I researched the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited and Missing Persons and the UK parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights.

“Each of the lines links the starting point of one of those travellers via any transit stops to their destination, so it might be someone being taken from Somali via Italy to Germany. On the map for Extraordinary Rendition a lot of the stop-offs are for refuelling in Scotland for the CIA planes. That was shocking to learn.”

Clare created the pieces by mapping the routes in acrylic paint piped onto coarse linen, a material similar in appearance to sackcloth, chosen to underline the crudeness of the travellers’ experiences. Each painting incorporates a symbolic, blank map of the world rendered as an abstract form and the shape of the paintings is reminiscent of the departure boards in airports or train stations.

“In all my experience in human rights and social justice work I’ve learned that you can argue with someone till the cows come home but if they don’t want to change their mind, they won’t. This is a way of giving someone time to reflect on the points you’re trying to make – I can express political or philosophical ideas through my art.”