Denise Emanuel Clemen

Denise Emanuel Clemen
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

STATEMENT

I am interested in stories—in their context and their subtext. I want to know how our stories-yours, mine, and the planet’s will end. I want to know how we will hold it together while things are falling apart.

My collages are analogue, created with a lot of precise cutting. A narrative takes shape inspired by an image, an experience, or an emotion. The main image is often a woman, and the other elements in the work reveal her story. These days I think a lot about the planet Earth, our mother. I think about my failings as a mother. And how all of us are failing the Earth. I think about saints, sinners, halos, hell, misogyny, and polar bears. While I find the process of writing structured and logical, collage is intuitive. The mystery of finding the many small pieces and placing them feels both liberated and liberating.

Two decades into the digital era, we are still awash in paper. A hundred years since the original proposal of an equal rights amendment women still struggle against an entrenched patriarchy. In my collage practice, I mine the quotidian. Catalogues, junk mail, food cartons, trash found in the street, magazines, and envelope privacy linings are sources of color and cultural context. My own handmade, hand painted, and hand marbled paper, as well as gel prints and original photographs combine with ephemera and classic art images to tell stories and ask questions about women and our place in the world that both detests and reveres us.

BIO

Denise Emanuel Clemen has worked as an art model, an actress, an au pair in Paris, an English teacher, a merchant of her own blood plasma, an assembly-line worker in a factory, and a marine naturalist on whale watching boats. Her essays and fiction have been published in dozens of literary magazines. She has received writing fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Ragdale Foundation. A visual artist since 2020, she makes collages, handmade paper, artist’s books, and decorative boxes. Denise has completed three Kolaj Institute residencies in Sanquhar, Scotland, and a residency at Casa Lü Sur in Mexico City. Her collages have been exhibited in galleries in Southern California, Pennsylvania, and New Orleans. After living most of her adult life in Los Angeles, she currently resides in Minneapolis.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
deniseemanuelclemen.com

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