Woman Crush Wednesday: Louisa Clement
© Louisa Clement
Interview by Qimei Fu
Can you tell us a little bit about the series? How did you start to work with mannequins?
I started working with mannequins as a form of placeholder for people and also as a visualization of avatars. Since I have dealt a lot with digital communication in my work, I needed a visual form to represent my questions and topics visually.
The series are different studies for me, partly situational, which refer to each other in different ways and link each other. So, in different series, the same dolls appear in a different form.
In Not Lost in You, how did you choose the special pattern clothes for those moving bodies to wear?
It is a performative act in the video series Not Lost in You, and one person acts with the avatar. One person acts with the avatar in the performance act in the video series Not Lost in You. I consider the basic feeling and question of the work to be something general that everyone knows. I also wanted to abstract and generalize the human body from the person acting in the video; to achieve this, I chose the decorative Nylon fabrics.
© Louisa Clement
You add more interactive elements into some recent work, such as the VR piece Aporias and the outdoor installation of Figure Poses. How do you feel about them?
I have always worked with different media, for me, the content of a work is always in the foreground. If the content is clear to me, it will be transformed into the appropriate medium and material. This leads to photography, sculptures, installations, and also VR work and public space work. For me, the medium follows the content.
Can you talk about your inspirations?
Many things inspire me, experiences, conversations, and encounters that shape me, but also texts I read, books, newspaper articles, songlines, and pictures. I believe it is the connection between all these things reflects in my artistic work.
© Louisa Clement
As your work often deals with communication and technology, do you have any particular observation about social media in the past few months of quarantine?
I believe that digital communication was a great relief at that time as a bridging factor. For me, the time has proven once again that the purely digital is not a possibility for human interaction. The human being needs a real counterpart and direct contact.
© Louisa Clement
What are you working on now?
At the moment, I'm trying to find further boundaries, in terms of media and content, and to question the real and the artificial in our world more animalistically. That's exactly how I am reminding and making awareness of the topics that occupy me and that I am working on it.
© Louisa Clement
